


The Fixer and the First Son

by ebjameston



Series: Stilinski & Associates [1]
Category: Scandal (TV), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Politics, Ambiguous/Open Ending, BAMF Stiles, First Son Derek Hale, M/M, Political Fixer Stiles Stilinski, President Talia Hale, Stiles is basically Olivia Pope, i don't even know what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-22 00:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2487554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ebjameston/pseuds/ebjameston
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You want me to arrange a political marriage for your son?” Stiles repeats dumbly.</p><p>“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve done this,” Talia Hale says, dark eyes twinkling over her impeccable blue pantsuit. “Senator Harvey and Elise’s match worked out perfectly, and they’re actually quite in love, from what I hear.” </p><p>“George Harvey was a little-known senatorial candidate from Kansas at the time, Madam President,” Stiles says slowly. “Your son – you, Mr. Hale,” he directs toward the man pacing tiny circles behind the president’s chair, “are the nation’s most eligible bachelor. Literally. I saw it on the cover of People.” </p><p>(Stiles is a political fixer. Derek is the president's son. I've been watching too much Scandal.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sometimes it feels like the future is coming so slow

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know. I have no explanation, other than I binge watched the first two seasons of Scandal and this just...happened.

**September, Year Three of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“You want me to arrange a political marriage for your son?” Stiles repeats dumbly.

“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve done this,” Talia Hale says, dark eyes twinkling over her impeccable blue pantsuit. “Senator Harvey and Elise’s match worked out perfectly, and they’re actually quite in love, from what I hear.”

“George Harvey was a little-known senatorial candidate from Kansas at the time, Madam President,” Stiles says slowly. “Your son – you, Mr. Hale,” he directs toward the man pacing tiny circles behind the president’s chair, “are the nation’s most eligible bachelor. Literally. I saw it on the cover of _People_.”

“I trusted you with the press for my presidential campaign,” Talia shoots back. “You have the skill and the discretion necessary.”

“With all due respect, Madam President, Stilinski & Associates is booked full these days. Anyone who’s thinking about running in next year’s elections is looking to pull skeletons out of their opponents’ closets or bury their own secrets even further. My team is already swamped. I don’t think we can take on another case at the moment, especially one so high profile.”

Talia fixes him with both barrels of what the campaign volunteers had not-so-secretly dubbed her D.I.C. (Death Is Coming) look, something she normally reserves for denouncing terrorist attacks or other injustices. “I’m the President of the United States, Stiles. I’m only _asking_ to be polite.”

Stiles concentrates on controlling his reactions, his fidgets, his gestures. He figured out during his first year of law school that his normal physical tics – pulling expressive faces, throwing his hands and head around as he talks – don’t go over well or benefit him in the political crowd. So he’s learned a first-class poker face, learned to let that energy simmer just below the surface.

(Scott calls this persona B-Stiles, for Business Stiles. Stiles interprets it as B-Stylz and spends a memorable Thanksgiving speaking only in terrible, punny raps.)

“Are you giving me an order, ma’am?” Stiles says slowly, aware that they’re starting to encroach on the very territory that ended with Stiles leaving the White House and going off to found Stilinski & Associates in the first place. “I don’t work for you anymore. I do not serve at the pleasure of the president.”

“Just show him, Mom,” Derek Hale mutters, not looking up from the path he’s wearing into Stiles’ office’s carpet. “His team will find them when they’re vetting me anyway.”

The president bristles at the tone in Stiles’ voice and calms at Derek’s. She extracts a plain manila envelope from her briefcase and slides it along the top of Stiles’ desk. Stiles spreads the contained 8x10 stills in front of him, leaning close to see the details of what looks like overhead shots from a bar’s security camera and a few phone pictures, including a screenshot of a Snapchat. In each photo, Derek – or someone who looks a hell of a lot like Derek, the quality’s pretty crap – is in a crowded bar, standing next to someone in a red hoodie with the hood pulled up so his face can’t be seen. Each subsequent picture shows them standing closer and closer, starting to get handsy, and ends with the moneyshot: Derek pressing Red Hood against a wall, faces blurred by lens flare, but there’s no question as to what they’re doing.

“I see,” Stiles says, clamping down on his actual reaction. He sweeps the pictures back together into a pile. “Who’s the guy?”

“I _told_ you they’d be able to tell that it’s a guy,” Derek says pointedly, finally collapsing into the chair next to his mother. “I have no idea.”

“Is he a prostitute?” Only the fact that this is the third time (this week) he’s had to ask that question keeps Stiles’ tone from straying from factual to judgmental.

“No! No. And I – I’m sure I know his name. Knew his name,” Derek corrects, plucking a paperweight off Stiles’ desk and turning it over in his hands. “I just don’t remember much about that night.”

“Do you think you were drugged?” Stiles pulls a new notepad out of one of his desk drawers and starts jotting notes longhand.

“God, no, nothing like that!” Derek says. “I mean, I don’t think so. I just…had a lot to drink. I was celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“It’s from April of this year,” Derek explains. “I’d just been made director of Hale Enterprises DC.”

“And you celebrated by...?”

“Going out to a bar with a few friends and apparently getting drunk off my ass,” Derek says flatly. “I don’t remember anything after the first two beers. I’m told Fireball was involved. I woke up back in my apartment in bed, alone, fully clothed the next day.”

“Your friends didn’t see who you were with?” Stiles flexes his fingers around the pen, flicking his eyes up to Derek to monitor his facial expressions.

Derek shakes his head. “They were in another part of the bar and didn’t see me leave.”

“What about your Secret Service detail? Luke and Chen are still your 24/7s, aren’t they?”

Derek flushes a shade of red that Stiles has only seen him achieve twice before. “I kind of…ditched them. Told them I was in for the night, not feeling well, then took the fire escape from my apartment to the roof, jumped to the next building, went out the back.”

“Derek!” Talia exclaims, clearly having not heard that particular piece of the story before.

Derek just shrugs sheepishly. “One of my friends called Luke from the bar at closing and they came to pick me up.”

“I’ll need the names of the friends who were with you,” Stiles says, dropping his pen and sifting through the pictures again. “Okay. There’s nothing inherently damning about any of these. You weren’t in a relationship with anyone at the time, you’re only 30. You were just a young, successful businessman letting off a little steam and having fun. Details of the night are blurry, but you remember everything that happened. You’re not releasing the guy’s name to protect his privacy. We’ll get your friends to corroborate. Drunken hook-up at a bar we can handle, blacked-out one night stand is a non-starter if we can avoid it.”

When he looks up, Talia is smirking and nodding; Derek is openly staring at him.

“What?” Stiles asks sharply, momentarily falling out of his B-Stiles façade.

“Oh, sorry, nothing,” Derek stutters. “It’s just…I forgot what you’re like when you’re…you know. Doing this.”

Stiles blinks, recomposes his thoughts. “Anyway. As far as potential matches go. I’ll consult with my team, but I’ve already got a few possibilities in mind. Leo Halliway, Representative Halliway’s son, is a civil rights lawyer based in Atlanta. Strong conviction history, well respected, takes pictures of his dogs for ridiculously cute Christmas cards every year. Divorced from his wife for eight years, now happily out.”

“Wait, Stiles --.”

“Or Hamid Haddad,” Stiles continues, steamrolling right over Derek’s protests. “Naturalized citizen, played a big role in the Middle East peace talks six years ago. A little older than ideal, but a lot of fun at parties.”

“Stiles, stop--.”

“Allen Markings is a neurosurgeon at James Madison,” Stiles muses, lapsing into a momentary flashback to the incredibly hot doctor he’d gone on four dates with a few months ago before amicably agreeing they’re better off as friends. “Broke up with his boyfriend last year, stellar record for innovation and research, told me he voted for you, Madam President.”

“Stiles, _stop_ ,” Talia barks, putting on her Commander in Chief voice. Stiles freezes mid-scribbled-thought and looks up. Derek is covering his face with his hands.

“I don’t want you to find Derek a husband,” she says. “I want to you find him a wife.”

 ***

“Mr. Hale, could I speak with you privately?” Stiles says, when his brain starts functioning again. “Madam President, please excuse us for a moment.”

He leads the way out of his office, trying to keep the tension from his gait. Scott, Kira, and Isaac are in a client meeting in the main conference room, but Lydia’s out onsite at Senator Wallace’s house, so he takes Derek to her small, exquisitely decorated office and shuts the door.

“Stiles, let me explain,” Derek is saying before the deadbolt even latches, but Stiles holds up a hand, stalks around Lydia’s desk, and braces his fingers against the wood.

“Mr. Hale. Your mother is already well aware of my _modus operandi_ , but seeing as you are the primary client for this case, allow me to enlighten you. I have one rule: complete and total honesty. If you lie to me, we’re done. Can you agree to that?”

Derek nods mutely, and Stiles swallows hard. This, this cold client/fixer relationship, is so painfully different from what he’s used to with Derek. He barely recognizes the man standing before him, and from the way Derek’s looking back, it’s clear that the feeling is mutual.

“Good. Now, what is your endgame?” Stiles sets his notepad down and starts writing again.

"What?”

 “You’re hiring my team for a service, Mr. Hale. In order to hold up my end of the deal, I need to know exactly what the terms of that service are. What exactly is it that you want out of this? What’s your endgame?”

“You heard my mother,” Derek says. “I just need a wife.”

“You say you _just need a wife_ , Mr. Hale, but what you mean is that you need my team to procure a politically and socially advantageous woman for you to marry, presumably on short notice given that you intend to run for governor of Louisiana next year, which means concocting a perfectly detailed, indisputable back story as to why you’re suddenly marrying a woman you’ve never been seen with before, and getting the public and press to actually _accept_ that story when they are _trained_ to ferret out lies and suspect corruption from everyone in the public eye.”

“I…yes,” Derek sighs, dropping into one of the squashy armchairs across from Lydia’s desk. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“And you need us to do this while covering up the fact that you are, in reality, a gay man, out to your immediate family, your ex-boyfriend, and a few very, very close friends.”

“Yes,” Derek says, but it’s really more of a whisper.

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“ _Why_ , Mr. Hale? It’s the twenty-first century. Same-sex marriage is legal in all fifty states. You wouldn’t be the first openly gay governor, or senator, or representative. _Gay_ I can work with. _Gay_ I can get elected to any office in the country. But you are asking me to set you up for a lifetime of lying to the public, a loveless marriage, and the constant niggling ache of shame in the back of your mind that comes from being closeted, so I need to know _why_.”

“I’m not ashamed, Stiles, I’m just a realist,” Derek says. He still has the paperweight from Stiles’ desk in his hands. “I’m running for governor of one of the most conservative states in the country. Louisianans don’t often elect Democrats to major public office, but they like what my mom’s done and they trust the Hale name – but asking them to elect an openly gay man? It’s not going to happen.”

“Every day of your life will be an act,” Stiles says. “Finding a woman to agree to that won’t be easy.”

Derek snorts. “Please. We live in DC – there’s an opportunist on every corner.”

“And that’s who you want to marry? An opportunist?”

“If I want to be governor, then yes, I suppose I need an opportunist.”

“Do you? Do you want to be governor?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve known you for four years, Derek, and you’ve never in your _life_ wanted to be in public office!”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you thought!”

A knock at the door and the subsequent ringing silence finally makes Stiles realize that he and Derek have been outright yelling for the past thirty seconds. He strides quickly around the desk, flips the bolt, and jerks the door open a few inches. Scott’s standing there, hands in his pockets, looking concerned.

“Scott,” Stiles snaps. “What?”

“Everything okay, dude?” Scott, bless him, doesn’t have a “B” side. He’s a heart-on-his-sleeve, everyone’s a dude, everything’s chill sort of guy, even when he’s using the brain that powered him to second in their class at Stanford Law.

Stiles takes a deep breath and visualizes pushing his stress away. Derek is a client. Stiles is not allowed to project his own experiences of living in the bisexual closet for eighteen years onto clients. Stiles isn’t allowed to project _anything_ onto clients – no judgment, just solutions. No judgment, just solutions. “Yeah. Yeah, we’re good. How’s our embezzling CFO doing?”

“He’s an epic dickwad,” Scott says bluntly. “Remind me why we take on clients who are pure scumbags?”

“Because you don’t say _no_ to being owed a favor by the C-level suite of a Fortune 10 company,” Stiles says patiently. “Want to come over tonight? I’m in need of one of those nights from undergrad where we eat crappy Chinese food and play video games.”

“Date with Allison tonight,” Scott says apologetically. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow. Now get back to work!”

Scott rolls his eyes, but heads obediently down the hallway. Stiles takes one more deep breath before re-closing the door and turning back to Derek. “So, Mr. Hale. We’ve outlined the terms. Do we have an agreement?”

“Why are you still taking notes on actual paper?” Derek asks. “You’ve got laptops all over the place, and typing’s got to be faster.”

“Computers can be hacked, Mr. Hale, and my firm handles very delicate cases involving the most important people in the republic. All notes and files are hardcopy until the case is resolved. I then write a summary report and save it to an external drive which is kept in a secure location known only to me. Answer the question, Mr. Hale.”

“You can call me Derek, Stiles,” Derek says, looking at the paperweight he is still, for the love of God, turning over in his hands. “You didn’t stand on formality during the campaign.”

“You weren’t my client during the campaign,” Stiles points out. “Complete honesty from you, heterosexuality perpetuation and political matchmaking from me. Do we have an agreement?”

 

**June, Talia Hale’s Campaign (4.25 years ago)**

Derek wants to straight-up murder Stiles no less than eight times during their first week on the campaign trail together. 

It starts on the Monday after he flies in, joining the campaign team in the middle of caucus and primary seasons. He’s fresh from his honorable discharge hearing to release him from Air Force duty, securing his spot in Harvard’s Business School to start the following January, and hasn’t made much of an effort to correct his jetlag from being stationed in Egypt for four months, so he’s awake and wired up by 4AM. He occupies himself by reading through political blogs, catching up on the campaign and all of his mom’s opponents. He makes a list of all the things he’ll need (suits, for one, since he doesn’t have a dress uniform anymore and put on about 30 pounds of muscle since 22-year-old Derek started Basic Training), reviews the week’s schedule that Deaton emailed late last night, and makes shitty in-room, single-serve coffee.

And then it’s 5AM.

He changes into his running shoes and heads for the door. Their hotel and the Hale campaign west coast HQ are located in the downtown area of some medium-sized, San Francisco-adjacent city, and he might not know his way around but he’s going to jump out of his skin if he has to stay in this room for another two hours. Besides, his phone has GPS. MapMyRun will get him back safely.

He swings open the door, focusing on selecting a playlist, and promptly runs into someone who swears softly and bounces off the door opposite his.

“…the hell?” Stiles scrubs at the back of his head where it impacted the door, further messing up the hair that’s sticking out in all directions.

“Sorry, sorry, didn’t see you,” Derek says, reaching out to steady him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, dude, I’m fine,” Stiles says, brushing his hand aside. “Just warn a guy before you brain him – oh, hey, Derek! I’m Stiles, don’t know if you remember, we met last night.” 

“You’re the debate prep guy who was asking my mom questions she’s absolutely not going to get this week,” Derek says. “And you asked for a llama to carry your stuff around.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “The congresswoman is going to blow Thursday’s debate out of the water; we’ve been ready for that for two weeks. She’ll win the California Democratic primary in a landslide. I’m trying to prep her for October.”

“October? The presidential debates?” Derek takes a step toward the elevator and Stiles mirrors him.

“Yup.”

“You’re aware that it’s June, right? She has to win primaries and caucuses and the DNC nomination.”

Stiles hits the button for the elevator, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Derek notices that Stiles, too, is in running clothes. “Don’t you think she can win?”

This is the first time Derek wants to kill Stiles. Standing there in a tight tech shirt that accentuates the spread of his shoulders, rocking the just-had-sex hair, looking at Derek with bright eyes and casually questioning his faith in his mom’s chances. Derek’s not sure if he wants to punch him or drag him back into one of their rooms and dispel his excess energy in other ways.

The elevator dings.

"Of course I think she can win,” Derek says, following Stiles into the elevator. “I just think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself.”

Stiles yawns and stretches an arm across his chest and that is _really not fair_. “I deferred my second semester of L3 at Stanford to work on this campaign because I believe that Talia Hale can and should be the first female President of the United States. I’m not here to play it cautious, hedge my bets, and screw around with maybes. I’m here to get your mom elected to the highest office in the world. Are you coming or what?”

Derek realizes that they’ve hit the ground floor and he’s still standing in the elevator car, staring after Stiles. He hasn’t heard anyone speak about _anything_ with that much passion in a long time.

“What?” He asks, finally stepping out into the lobby.

Stiles sighs. “They told me you’re smart, Hale, don’t disappoint me.” (This is the second time Derek wants to kill him.) “I’m going running, you’re clearly going running, I know my way around the area and you don’t. Are you coming or what?”

The third time Derek wants to kill him is when Stiles handily beats him in the flat-out sprint back to the hotel doors at the end of the run.

*** 

“He’s _infuriating_ ,” Derek fumes on Tuesday night, pacing circles around Laura’s room while his sisters eat take-out Thai food and watch the news. “Did you hear that argument he got into with Deaton?”

Murderous urge number four had cropped up earlier that day, when Derek walked in on Stiles and Alan Deaton, his mom’s campaign manager, arguing over their travel timeline to the Utah primary.

“Deaton’s been doing this for longer than Stiles has been _alive_ ,” Derek continues.

“Shut up and eat your curry,” Laura says, brandishing a carton at him. “Stiles is right.”

“What,” Derek says flatly, accepting the carton and falling heavily into the desk chair.

“He’s right,” Laura repeats. “Mom’s never going to win the Utah primary. Utah liberals are conservatives in any other state; she’s too far left for them.”

“Shouldn’t waste time and money campaigning where we don’t stand a chance,” Cora agrees, dumping more rice into her Pra Ram. “Mom needs to get back to DC to sit on this session. We do some grassroots stuff for show, Mom joins us the day of the primary, we move on.”

“He’s a jackass.”

“He’s the best young political operative I’ve seen in a long time,” Laura says. “Might be better than Deaton in a few years.”

 “He’s still a jackass.”

Laura looks at him quizzically. “Does someone have a crush?”

“No! No, I do not have a crush, that’s not – it’s not funny!”

Laura and Cora collapse against each other in fits of laughter. Derek throws a piece of broccoli at them that Cora somehow manages to catch in her mouth. Derek mock-growls, sets his food aside, and launches himself onto the bed.

“I am a grown man!” He shouts, pinning Cora’s hands with his legs and tickling Laura until she’s wheezing. “I served in the Air Force! I go to Harvard!”

They wrestle for a few more minutes, ending up snuggled in a big lump in the middle of the bed. With one sister tucked under each arm, Derek feels almost like they’re kids again, watching TV at home.

“You don’t have to hide it, Derek,” Cora says when she’s gotten her breath back. “We all love you just the same. Things are different now, better than when we were growing up.”

“Yeah, what Mom really needs is her American solider son coming out sixth months before Election Day,” Derek says sarcastically, tugging on a piece of her hair.

“You can’t pretend forever,” Laura says.

“Can’t I?”

“You shouldn’t have to,” she amends.

“Let it go, guys,” he says quietly. “Another discussion for another day.”

They sit quietly for a while, just enjoying being back together.

“Derek?”

“Yeah, Cora.”

“I’m really glad you’re safe.”

“What?”

Cora sits up, using Derek’s chest for leverage. “This whole time you’ve been on active duty, I’ve been nervous. Worrying that you’d never come home, that something would happen and then someone would be handing Mom a folded flag and I’m just…I’m just really glad that you’re safe.”

“Whoa, hey, Little Bear,” Derek says, using Cora’s childhood nickname and folding her into a hug. “You know that I was mostly on desk duty. I only saw action three times, and even those weren’t too serious.”

“Not the point,” Laura says, wrapping her arms around both of them. “You’re _ours_ , Grumble Bear, and we missed you.”

He presses a kiss to the top of Laura’s head. “Missed you too, Bossy Bear.”

 ***

Derek doesn’t want to kill Stiles at all on Wednesday. But that’s probably only because Stiles spends the entire day scouting Thursday’s debate location.

 ***

The California Democratic presidential candidate debate – the first official and televised debate of the campaign, precursor to the incredibly influential California primary the following Tuesday, is slated to start at 7PM on Thursday. Stiles, for the first time that week, misses their morning run, and when Derek asks around, he’s told that Stiles has been at the debate site since 4AM. He still hasn’t seen Stiles by noon, so he makes his way over to the selected high school auditorium to check it out. Derek doesn’t have an official role on the campaign team yet – Laura’s the Volunteer Coordinator, Dad’s a speech writer, and Cora’s the Youth Outreach lead – so he helps in whatever ways he can be useful until Stiles appears out of nowhere, grabs Derek by the arm, and drags him into the classroom that the Hale team is using as a temporary base of operations.

“Out!” Stiles barks at the couple volunteers assembling signs and a few members of the advance team, steel in his voice that Derek’s never heard from him before. Everyone scurries in record time, and Stiles closes and locks the door behind them.

“Stiles, what--?”

“Shut up,” Stiles says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just shut up and let me think for a second.”

Derek stares at him. In the four days he’s known this man, he’s seen him get worked up several times – but this is different. The seconds stretch long, and Derek’s about to make a joke to break the tension when Stiles drops his hand to his side, looks Derek in the eye, and plainly asks, “Are you gay?”

Derek’s pretty sure his jaw actually drops open. “ _What_?”

"No, you’re right – that’s not what’s important. Do you want the public to _think_ you’re gay?”

Derek can’t decipher the mess of emotions roiling around in his stomach, but this is definitely murderous rage number five. “Where the fuck do you get off asking me that?”

“The Talbot campaign knows that their only possible way to win this debate is to attack your mother on every point,” Stiles says. Derek can practically see the energy swimming just beneath Stiles’ skin. “I’ve prepped Talia to handle questions about her being a woman, lack of military experience, not having a graduate degree – she is ready to field any shallow, inane question meant to distract from the fact that she has the best platform out of any candidate in this goddamned election. But they are going to ask what it means when a mother forces her gay son to stay in the closet to win an election, Derek, and she is _not prepared for that_.”

“I – _what_?” Derek stammers. “How do you even know they’re going to ask that?”

“I’ve got a guy,” Stiles says, waving a hand dismissively.

“You’ve got a guy? You’ve got a _spy_ in the Talbot campaign?”

“Not the fucking point, Derek!” Stiles shouts. “Deaton will be here in three hours, your mother in two. We have time. I can get it leaked back to Talbot that we know and we’re prepared, but I need to know _right now_ which direction we’re taking this so the Rapid Response guys can start working on an answer. So when your mother stands on that stage in front of the entire country in four hours, is she saying _Yes, Derek’s gay, we were protecting his privacy and it’s his right to choose how to come out and how dare you Governor Talbot,_ or is she saying _Derek is not gay, but if he were I would never ask him to hide that for my political gain, I love my son and I would love him if he were gay because it’s nothing to be ashamed of_?”

Stiles stands in front of him, breathing hard, face flushed, pupils blown, and all Derek can think is that this is probably what Stiles looks like after sex.

Derek wants to make Stiles look like this. Numerous times.

He also wants to kill Stiles for putting him on the spot like this. Six.

“Not. Gay,” Derek forces past his clenched jaw.

For the briefest fraction of a second, an expression that Derek can’t read flashes across Stiles’ face. Then the mask drops backs into place.

“Fine,” Stiles spits, digging through his pocket for his phone and dialing. “Scott? It’s me. We have an answer, and we will _destroy_ your guy if he asks the question.”

(Talbot asks. Talia, true to Stiles’ word, destroys him.)

 ***

Stiles avoids Derek on Friday. Not actually physical avoidance, but there’s a distance there – he doesn’t talk during their run, he doesn’t pester Derek with his usual questions about life in the Air Force. There’s a distance there, and Derek doesn’t like it.

 ***

On Saturday, Stiles is back to normal without explanation. He accompanies Derek, Laura, and Cora to their appearance at an at-risk youth workshop and makes friends with all the kids, telling stories about growing up three hours north of Sacramento and having a Sheriff for a father. He smiles at Derek from across the cafeteria during lunch, distracting him long enough for 12-year-old Monica to drop a handful of mashed potatoes down the back of Derek’s shirt.

 _Seven_ , Derek thinks, as the incident devolves into a fully-fledged food fight.

 ***

Stiles wakes Derek up an hour earlier than usual on Sunday for their run, insisting that it’s going to rain later so they need to go _now_. When Derek just grunts and rolls over, Stiles retrieves a bucket of ice, throws back the covers, and dumps it onto the small of Derek’s back.

Eight. Definitely, definitely eight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry not sorry. 
> 
> Chapter Title is a lyric from Human Cannonball by Cadillac Sky.


	2. there's a darkness upon me that's flooded in light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All too soon, Derek jerks the door he’s leaning against open. Derek narrowly stops him from cracking his head on the pavement with a hand on the collar of his jacket, and Stiles grins up at him from his horizontal, half-suspended position. “Mr. Hale. I take it things didn’t go well, as you were only gone for thirty minutes?”  
> “No connection,” Derek says, levering Stiles back onto his seat and climbing in after him.  
> “I repeat: you were only in there for thirty minutes,” Stiles says, already tallying up how much damage control he might need to do with Rose if she feels jilted.  
> “Which is twenty-nine more than I needed to know it wasn’t going to work.”

**September, Year Three of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“Derek Hale,” Stiles says, taping a picture of Derek to the window. “Louisiana gubernatorial candidate. Former captain of the US Air Force, graduated Harvard Business, current director of Hale Enterprises DC, son of President Talia Hale. We need to find him a wife.”

Kira, the newest member of S&A, blinks. “We’re going to arranged marriage someone?”

“Two someones, actually. It takes a man and a woman to pull off this particular holy matrimony,” Stiles says. “Lydia, who are our candidates?”

“Three immediate front-runners from the list,” Lydia replies, gracefully standing and taping three headshots up next to Derek. Despite Stiles’ initial reluctance to get involved in political matchmaking (“Stilinski & Associates is not eHarmony for the DC elite, Lydia.”), it’s actually a fairly common and profitable practice (“We are if they’re willing to pay that much, Stiles.”), so S&A keeps a running list of singles that hit the various criteria that make a solid spousal choice for any politician.

“First choice is Chelsea Brighton, a middle school math teacher. She came to DC straight out of college on Teach for America and says that she found her passion trying to improve our public schools. Like Derek, she went to Washington University in St. Louis for undergrad, likes to cook, and speaks fluent Spanish.”

“Political affiliations?” Scott asks.

“Nothing declared,” Lydia hedges. “But we can sell her as an educator, not a politician. It’ll hit home in New Orleans.”

“Anything in her past we need to be concerned about?” Isaac asks.

“Nothing I could find in a cursory search. No children or prior marriages. She’s from a farming community in Idaho, it doesn’t seem like she had much of an opportunity to get into trouble growing up.”

“I like her,” Stiles says. “Set up the interview. Who’s next?”

“Rose Atwater, internist at Inova Alexandria. Graduated Johns Hopkins Medical, published in numerous medical journals, held up by the community here and in her home state of Alabama as a shining example of what can happen when a promising young black girl follows her dreams. She and her ex-husband filed for divorce citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ four years ago; one child, a six-year-old boy, who lives with his father in Montgomery.”

“The public won’t like that,” Scott points out. “They’ll see a mother who didn’t fight for her kid. Political wives can’t put their own careers over their families.”

“The Hale dynasty has family values coming out of its ears,” Kira argues. “Let Derek court the family vote, stress Rose as a leader of the black community.”

The four core members of Stiles’ team look to him for final approval. He shrugs. “Eh. I don’t love her like I love Chelsea, but we always need a contingency plan. Set up the interview. Next.”

“Third option is Sofia Ruiz, corporate lawyer. Yale educated, registered Democrat, actually hails from New Orleans. Outspoken advocate for --.”

“Any relation to Senator Ruiz?” Stiles interrupts.

“One sec.” Lydia taps rapidly on her tablet. “Oh. Yes, looks like she’s his niece.”

There’s a collective sigh from everyone but Isaac.

“He’s a loose cannon,” Scott explains. “Has sat on both sides of the aisle, filibustered an important immigration reform bill straight into the ground with no warning, says inflammatory things to the press without talking to party leaders.”

“She can’t help who she’s related to,” Isaac says.

“Connections make you or break you in this town.”

“Scott’s right,” Lydia says, wrapping a perfectly curled lock of hair around her perfectly manicured finger.

“Agreed,” Stiles says, readying the next part of the debrief. “Sofia’s off the table until we talk to Chelsea and Rose. Lydia, try to find a different third option. Now, there’s a second level to this case: Derek Hale is gay.”

To his team’s credit, no one gasps or laughs or swears. Lydia just cocks her head to one side and says, “Are we finding him a wife or a husband?”

“A wife. Definitely a wife. He and the president don’t believe he can win Louisiana as an openly gay man.”

It’s also to his team’s credit that no one questions this. They trust that Stiles has all the information and is making the right decision for the client, a show of faith that makes him glow just a little. He’s worked for this, he’s earned the unquestioning respect of his team, and this is why Stilinski & Associates is the most infamous, successful firm of its kind.

“Why can’t he just run as a single guy?” Kira asks.

In response, Stiles tacks up one of the pictures of Derek and the guy in the red hoodie. This time, there’s some under-the-breath cursing.

“Who knows?” Scott asks, after letting the news sink in for a few seconds.

“Not many,” Stiles says, sticking additional pictures up on the glass as he speaks. “Talia, David, Laura, and Cora Hale, the immediate family. Alan Deaton, the president’s Chief of Staff. Paige Shelby, a girl Derek tried to date in college and later became a close family friend. Daniel Masterson, Derek’s Air Force co-captain. Luke Winters and Tai Chen, Derek’s primary Secret Service guys.”

Stiles steps back, looks at the spread.

“Daniel and Paige are the only potential leaks,” Lydia says slowly. “Are we sure they’re trustworthy?”

 "Absolutely, according to Derek and the president, but we’ll bring them in for assessment,” Stiles says. “What else?”

 “He hasn’t had much of a romantic life at all,” Kira says, now with her laptop open, paging through Derek’s past. “Nothing serious since Paige. He was ROTC in college and went into active duty for four years after that. Honorable discharge when his mom became a serious presidential candidate. Started Harvard Business School immediately after the election, pushed himself through a two-year program in eighteen months, took a junior management position at HaleEnt NOLA at 28, moved here to be director of HaleEnt DC at 30. That was in April.” She looks up from her screen. “He certainly hasn’t had much time for dating. Will that be a problem?”

“It just means that the cover explaining why the perpetual bachelor is suddenly marrying needs to be that much stronger,” Stiles muses. “Needs to be someone Derek might have legitimately run into a few times before, so we can sell the story of long-destined sweethearts.”

“Makes Chelsea a great match,” Scott says. “They both went to WashU.”

“They didn’t overlap, though, Derek’s four years older than her,” Lydia says. “Oh! Alumni events?”

“Good thinking,” Stiles praises. “Look into when and where, start building the timeline. What else?”

His team is silent, thinking. Finally, Isaac asks the question Stiles knew was coming: “What about the guy?”

“What guy?” Lydia asks distractedly, already presumably finding lists of the university’s DC-area alumni events for the past few years.

“The guy in the picture, in the red hoodie,” Isaac says, pointing. “Pretty sure he knows Derek’s gay. Could be a problem if he knows who he hooked up with.”

“He won’t be a problem,” Stiles says, speaking past the lump in his throat and ignoring the pointed look that a notably quiet Scott is giving him.

“We know who he is, then?” Lydia asks. “We’re paying him off?”

“Ah, no need,” Stiles says. “The guy in the picture is Derek’s only ex-boyfriend, someone he had a brief relationship with immediately after getting back from overseas. He won’t talk.”

“How do we know?” Lydia persists, and Stiles can basically feel Scott’s eyes digging a hole into the side of his head at this point.

“Because,” Stiles says, taping the final headshot on the window, “it’s me. The last player in this case is me, Stiles Stilinski.”

***

Chelsea turns out to be out of town for two weeks at a conference in Detroit, so they start with Rose. The 31-year-old physician passes the interest/risk-gauging interview with flying colors, so with help from Agents Luke Winters and Tai Chen, Stiles gets her first date with Derek (lunch at a moderately-visible spot a few block from the Capitol) on the books within two weeks of his initial meeting with Derek and the president.

Stiles hangs out in Luke and Chen’s nondescript silver sedan on the curb while Derek and Rose eat. After his usual attempts to get the Secret Service men he’s known for almost as long as he’s known Derek to engage in conversation, he gives up and lets himself get sucked into answering emails from his phone.

All too soon, Derek jerks the door he’s leaning against open. Derek narrowly stops him from cracking his head on the pavement with a hand on the collar of his jacket, and Stiles grins up at him from his horizontal, half-suspended position. “Mr. Hale. I take it things didn’t go well, as you were only gone for thirty minutes?”

“No connection,” Derek says, levering Stiles back onto his seat and climbing in after him.

“I repeat: you were only in there for thirty minutes,” Stiles says, already tallying up how much damage control he might need to do with Rose if she feels jilted.

“Which is twenty-nine more than I needed to know it wasn’t going to work.”

Stiles drags a hand across his face. He knows this Derek. This is the Derek Hale that punched out an Air Force buddy for pushing Cora to hook up and then refused to speak for nearly twenty-four hours. This Derek gets his hackles up and settles into the trenches.

“Fine,” Stiles says, knowing when the battle’s lost before it’s begun. “Chelsea Brighton gets back next week; Lydia will call your office to put it on your calendar.”

“Good.”

“Great,” Stiles retorts, allowing himself to be the tiniest bit petty. He lets himself out of the car, hunches his shoulders against the earlier autumn chill, and walks the long way back to Stilinski & Associates.

 

**September, Talia Hale’s Campaign (4 years ago)**

“Your sister is gorgeous, you know that?” Stiles says, his words slurring together just a bit. “Like, really, _really_ gorgeous. Both of them, actually. Both of your sisters are _gorgeous_.”

“Keep it in your pants, Stiles,” Derek says sarcastically. In light of his mom and newly-confirmed running mate Travis McKinney officially winning the Democratic National Convention nomination as well as Laura’s 30th birthday, the entire campaign team is taking the night off and celebrating at a Denver bar they’d rented out. Stiles stupidly agreed to play drinking games with the local headquarters’ Get Out the Vote college contingent. While he truly dominated them at Quarters, came in second during Irish Car Bombs, and narrowly won some dramatic event that involved flaming shots and one of the volunteers losing an eyebrow, it’s now just past eleven and Stiles is slumped half over a table, half over Derek’s shoulder, waxing poetic about Laura and Cora – who are sitting right across from him.

“You should probably take him back to the hotel,” Cora laughs, ruffling Stiles’ hair and smirking when he flails ineffectually at her hand. “He’s going to have a wicked hangover in the morning, and we need him coherent by noon for the strategy session.”

“I will not have a hangover!” Stiles protests, pushing himself upright. “Stiles Stilinski never has hangovers! I am hangover-impervious.”

“Know how we can tell you’re drunk, Stiles?” Laura asks.

“You besmirch my character! I am not drunk!” Stiles insists, then narrows his eyes suspiciously. “How?”

“Because you’re talking like an 18th-century British nobleman,” Laura whispers conspiratorially. “Seriously though, Derek, you’re on Stiles duty. It’s my birthday and I’m going to go flirt with Mark.”

Laura heads off in the direction of their Colorado Communications Director and Cora excuses herself a short while later, probably going back to the hotel to call her boyfriend.

“You know you don’t stand a chance with either of them, right?” Derek says once Cora’s out of earshot.

Stiles scoots around the table so he’s sitting across from Derek, dragging his water with him and immediately going back to mangling the straw. “What?”

"My sisters. Cora’s hopelessly in love with Sean, and you’re too young for Laura – she sees you like a little brother.”

Stiles frowns. “What are you talking about?”

“’Really, really gorgeous,’” Derek mocks, dropping his slight southern accent as best he can. “’Cora’s hair is like silk, I should commission a monument to Laura’s legs.’ You’re laying it on pretty thick.”

Stiles squints at him. “Are you feeling left out? Because you’re the only one of the Hales I’m not pining over?”

Derek forces himself to let out a laugh that sounds horribly awkward. “Sure, Stiles. I’m sure that’s it.”

It’s been two and a half months of this. Two and a half months since Derek joined up with the campaign team and met Stiles, two and a half months of Stiles being an equal opportunity flirt with literally everyone on the team (except when he clicks into his professional mode).

Only two months, though, since Stiles casually let slip that he has both ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends, then spent hours going through old photos of exes with Cora and reminiscing while Derek tried very hard not to put his head through a wall.

Still, Derek can’t blame him for having fun and drinking a little too much tonight. Stiles deserves and probably desperately needs to let loose a bit. He became the official press secretary for the campaign a month ago and started working even harder, sleeping even less, and while watching Stiles easily command a room full of reporters with confidence and good humor does funny things to parts of Derek’s anatomy he’d rather not think about, watching Stiles start to fissure just a tiny, tiny bit around the edges isn’t enjoyable. So, if for once Stiles wants to be the one being taken care of instead of the one taking care of everyone else, Derek’s up for the challenge.

Derek is not, however, prepared for Stiles’ foot to hook around his ankle under the table.

He startles and nearly spit-takes his mouthful of beer. “What are you doing?”

Stiles grins, a mischievous little quirk of the lips that Derek’s come to recognize as a warning sign. “Wouldn’t want you to feel left out.”

Derek sighs and bats his foot away. “You’re drunk.”

“No, seriously,” Stiles says, leaning over the table a little. “Your family’s genetic lottery did _not_ skip you. I mean, your body _alone_ probably gets you any girl you want.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Okay, now you’re just being ridiculous.”

Stiles’ eyes drift across Derek’s face, his shoulders, his collarbone, and the intensity and intimacy of the moment shocks him. He should stop Stiles. He should really, really stop Stiles.

“But then you throw in that _jaw_ ,” Stiles continues. “And that _face_. Don’t even get me _started_ on your eyes. A guy could have some seriously naughty thoughts, thinking about those eyes looking at him while you’re…holy mother of hell, I am talking to my guy’s son.”

Derek watches Stiles’ face transition from lust to realization to horror with his last sentence. Stiles shoves abruptly back from the table and tries to stand up, tripping in the process and crashing back into the bench.

“Shit – fuck – Derek, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what – I’m drunk, I’m sorry, I’m just going to go back to the hotel and, like, ask the kitchen to flambé my brain.”

“Laura will kill me if I let you leave here alone like this,” Derek says, standing up and offering his hand to help Stiles find his feet. It’s easier than processing the warring feelings in his chest and his head and his…nope, nope, nope. Not having those thoughts about Stiles. Definitely not.

Stiles, for once in his life, shuts up. He accepts Derek’s hand up, drops it immediately once he’s balanced, and hightails it to the door and down the street so quickly that Derek has to jog to keep pace.

The hotel is a ten-minute walk from the bar, and the elevator is dinging its arrival on Stiles’ floor before he speaks again. “I’m really, really sorry,” he says, holding the door open with one arm. “I was…I had too much to drink. It was unprofessional and inexcusable and I’m so, so sorry. If you’re uncomfortable with me staying with the campaign, I’ll leave tomorrow.”

Derek is…Derek doesn’t know what Derek is. But Derek knows that he doesn’t want Stiles to leave.

“Come back in,” he hears himself saying after a brief pause. “I’m one floor up. I need to make sure you drink more water and are sober enough to go to sleep without choking on your own vomit.”

Stiles hesitates, eyes wide, color high in his cheeks, and takes the two steps back into the elevator car. They stand side by side, not touching, not talking, not looking at each other. Derek steps out onto his floor and leads the way to his room, shucking off his jacket and tie as he goes. He drops them over the desk chair and turns to find Stiles standing awkwardly just inside the closed door, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“I mean it,” Stiles says quietly. “I’ll leave the campaign if you want me to.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Derek says, brushing past him to fill a glass of water in the bathroom. “You’re the best Press Secretary my mom’s ever had. Even Deaton says so.” He presses the glass against Stiles’ chest on his way back, then throws himself on the bed, bouncing heavily on his back.

There’s a rustle of movement, and Derek props himself up on his elbows to see Stiles sitting on the desk, feet dangling above the floor, glass of water full in his hands. “I can try to stay away from you, then,” Stiles says, still speaking in a quiet, half-broken little voice that makes Derek want to hug him or shake him or scream at him to just _go back to fucking normal_.

Almost like Stiles heard Derek’s internal rant, he suddenly nods his head, chugs the water, and stands. “No. No, I’m your mom’s Press Secretary, and I’m damn good at my job. I can be a fucking professional.” He shakes out his limbs, takes a deep breath, sets the glass on the desk, and looks directly at Derek. “Derek, I apologize for my earlier behavior. It was unprofessional, and it will _not_ happen again. I’ve had the water, I’m sufficiently sober enough that I’m no longer a danger to myself. Laura would be proud. Thank you, and I’ll see you in the morning.” He starts walking towards the door.

There are moments in Derek’s life when he knows what’s going to happen. Sure, he’s been a mostly-closeted gay guy ever since he was old enough to know what he wanted, but Stiles was right about one thing earlier: it’s never been particularly difficult for him to find a willing partner. He managed a number of semi-anonymous hookups with guys in college. Fumbled handjobs in bathrooms of clubs at 2AM (including a few times recently, once in Boston when he was visiting Harvard and once when he went Las Vegas for Daniel’s bachelor party a couple weeks back); messy head in some frat guy’s room, both too drunk to really remember; that Halloween when he made some kid in a Power Rangers costume pant and moan and scream, all without taking off his Batman mask or giving his name. He’s also picked up his fair share of girls in significantly less dodgy situations, when he just needed to take the edge off without going through the trouble of orchestrating a nameless situation. So he knows the cues, he knows the looks that you give and receive, he knows that success or failure hinges on moments like this, and he can predict exactly what will happen next.

He knows what happens next, and he knows that it’s a bad idea. He knows what he’s risking and what this will do to Stiles. Derek, like anyone from a political family, knows how to make people fall in love with him. And because Stiles is open and willing and honest and Derek’s been with people like Stiles, he knows what to say and do, knows precisely what strings to pull, and Stiles will fall in love and then Derek will, inevitably, destroy him. This isn’t fair for him to do.

Derek is not under the illusion that he’s a good guy. He doesn’t _like_ that he’s not a good guy, but he knows it, and he knows how to get what he wants.

He’s off the bed and across the room before he’s even done processing. He catches Stiles’ wrist on the doorknob and spins him around, backs him gently against the door, brackets Stiles’ body with his arms, and says, “Stay.”

“I already said I’d stay with the campaign,” Stiles mumbles, looking at the carpet.

“I don’t mean the campaign. I mean, stay with _me_.”

 Stiles’ feet aren’t against the door, so he has to tilt his head up to compensate for the height difference, exposing the long line of his neck. “Derek?”

Hearing his name falling from Stiles’ lips in this position sends sparks rushing through Derek’s body, and he lets himself drag his tongue up the side of Stiles’ throat. “Yes, Stiles.”

“You told me you aren’t...” Stiles breathes, his hands alternately pushing at Derek’s shoulders and fisting in his shirt, dropping his chin to try to avoid Derek’s ministrations. “At the debate in San Francisco, you _told_ me--.”

Derek snakes a hand around Stiles’ hip and uses it to jerk them roughly closer, matching up their bodies line for line. “You actually asked what I wanted the public to think. Said that was more important.”

“Lie of – omission,” Stiles manages, breath coming in shallow little gasps, then Derek uses his other hand to lift Stiles’ chin and he kisses him, kisses him like he’s wanted to since that first goddamned night in San Francisco. Stiles lets out a little whimper that sets Derek’s skin on fire, and he deepens the kiss until his head is pounding for air.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Stiles exhales, voice six kinds of wrecked, and Derek can’t help the smirk that crosses his face.

“Not tonight,” he teases. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Not _that_ much,” Stiles protests, winding his arms around Derek’s neck and trying to draw him in, but this is Derek’s game now. He slams Stiles back into the door from where they’ve staggered a few inches away, pins both of his wrists above his head using one hand. He trails the fingers of his other hand slowly, ever so slowly, down Stiles’ arm, chest, stomach, and slides a hand under his shirt to trace the fine dusting of hair leading down into Stiles’ jeans.

“Der- _ek_ ,” Stiles pleads, and Derek didn’t know how much he needed to hear Stiles say his name in that tone of voice until this exact moment.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Derek whispers against Stiles’ neck, letting the very tips of his fingers stray just below the elastic of Stiles’ briefs, feeling the muscles in Stiles’ stomach spasm under his touch. “Understand? No one.”

Stiles nods, but that’s not enough. “I need to hear you say it, Stiles,” Derek says, pushing his hand just a little lower, relishing the change in texture of the short hairs beneath his fingers and the way Stiles’ flush drops another shade.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Stiles breathes, bucking away from the wall. “Promise.”

“Good.” Derek whips his hand out of Stiles’ pants, wraps it around his back, and kisses him again, whirling away from the door in a smooth motion. He pulls Stiles around with him, unlocks the door with his free hand, and swings the door open at the same instant he breaks the kiss. “Goodnight, Stiles.”

Stiles, dazed, stumbles into the hall. Derek pushes the door shut, flips both locks, and slides down to the floor, pressing the heels of his hands hard against his eye sockets.

Again: Derek is _not_ under the illusion that he is a good guy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has officially taken over my life. The full draft is already 25K long and it's only half written. Send caffeine and snacks. 
> 
> THANK YOU for the kudos and comments! The response I got for the first chapter was amazing, I'm so glad you guys like this AU as much as I do :)
> 
> Chapter title is a lyric from Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise by The Avett Brothers.


	3. everybody's unworthy and everybody loves everybody else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His phone rings loudly in the quiet car, and he answers without looking at the ID. “Look, Stiles, I don’t--."
> 
> “Not Stiles,” Laura interrupts. “Your loving sister here, wanting to know why the fuck I just heard a rumor that you’re looking for a goddamn wife."

**October, Year Three of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“You’ve got to give me reasons,” Stiles insists, jogging a few steps to catch up. “We can’t do better next time without reasons. Give me _something_ to go on.”

Derek’s fresh off his second semi-blind, Stiles-arranged date, although he lasted fifteen minutes longer with Chelsea than he did with Rose, he still left the table immediately after paying the check and promising the girl that she’d done nothing wrong. Stiles, sipping coffee on a bench outside the restaurant, had winced when Derek pushed the door open.

Derek grits his teeth and keeps right on stomping toward the nondescript black sedan, where his Secret Service detail are waiting. Luke opens the door for him, and Derek pauses with one foot in the car and one on the sidewalk. “If I asked you to pick your favorite villain from the DC universe, what would you say?”

“The Joker,” Stiles says immediately. “Wait, no, Professor Zoom. Or Darkseid. I really like Talia al Ghul’s storyline, though – but why are we even talking about DC villains? Marvel’s are so, _so_ much better.”

Derek snorts back a laugh. Of course Stiles has the perfect answer ready on the tip of his tongue. Of-fucking-course. “Find me someone who can answer as well as you did. Then we’ll talk.”

He slams the door, leaving Stiles looking ticked on the sidewalk as Chen cautiously eases them into the nightmare that is midday DC traffic.

“Where to, Mr. Hale?”

“To the river,” Derek says morosely. “And bring me a bucket of cement.”

“Certainly, sir,” Luke says politely. “Although I’m sure your co-directors would appreciate if that could wait until after the investors’ meeting at two.”

“You’re awful and I hate you,” Derek groans. “To the office, then.”

His phone rings loudly in the quiet car, and he answers without looking at the ID. “Look, Stiles, I don’t--.”

“Not Stiles,” Laura interrupts. “Your loving sister here, wanting to know why the fuck I just heard a rumor that you’re looking for a goddamn wife.”

“Laura,” Derek sighs. “I don’t really have time for this right now. Can we talk later?”

“Can we talk later about you fucking mail-ordering a bride like you’re some pedophiliac Russian geezer? No, Derek, we can’t _talk later_ – oh, fuck. You thought I was Stiles because you fucking – you incredibly insensitive fucking _bastard_!”

“You curse a lot when you’re angry,” Derek interjects drily when she stops for breath.

“Derek,” Laura says, and all the explosive rage has gone out of her voice, replaced by the Hale woman-patented quiet, dangerous rage that Derek once saw her use to make an entire room of Ivy-educated interns cry. “You are going to be at my apartment tonight at 8PM. And if I find out that you are using _Stiles’ firm_ to find a wife for the election, so help me _God_ I will make your life hell.”

 

***

 

Derek brings Indian food to try to mollify her, but one look at Laura’s face when she swings open the door at 8:02 tells Derek that he’s in for a long night. She shoves a beer at him, takes the food, and leads him into the living room where Cora is already seated on the floor, glass of wine in one hand. Once they’re both settled on the couch, Laura takes a long pull of her beer and fixes him with the same stare Cora’s using.

“Talk.”

So, he talks. Laura and Cora both knew about him and Stiles during the campaign, and they both railed at him after what happened on Election Day, but now he tells them everything else. He tells them about going to Stiles’ law school graduation and his father’s funeral. He tells them about running into Stiles at the boxing gym when he visited DC last March. He tells them about the truly disastrous attempt to make things better at the company Christmas party. He tells them about the picture from the bar, not remembering the guy, the plan he and Mom and Deaton came up with, the realization that Stilinski & Associates was the only possible choice to handle it. He tells them about the two fruitless dates and the string of one-night stands he’s had since the campaign. He tells them everything he hasn’t told them – it just floods out of him.

When he’s done talking, his untouched food is cold his lap and his beer is sitting in a little puddle of its own condensation on Laura’s coffee table.

“You are a heartless bastard,” Laura says after a long silence.

Derek swallows a mouthful of beer, lukewarm liquid soothing his throat. “I know.”

“You’re my brother and I love you, but you’re a heartless bastard.”

“I know.”

“You’re also a complete fuck-up,” Cora says, speaking for the first time since Derek arrived. “You love him, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, we all love Stiles.”

“Cut the willful ignorance crap,” Cora says flatly. “You’re _in_ love with him. Like, in-way-too-deep, sobbing-into-your-ice-cream, doodling- _Derek_ _Stilinski_ -on-the-back-of-your-notebook in love with him.”

Derek blinks at her. “Did you hit your head on something recently?”

“Oh. My. God,” Laura says, and Derek turns to see her staring at him with something like horrified delight on her face. “She’s right. You’re in love with Stiles. You have been this entire time, haven't you? Since, like, day _one_.”

“Is there some girls-only class in college where they teach you to jump to insane conclusions inspired by romantic comedies?”

“It actually makes sense,” Cora says, talking over her shoulder as she grabs their food containers and walks into the kitchen. “You were so goddamned chipper when the two of you were sleeping together during the campaign and so epically distraught after it ended.”

“That’s pretty typical for a relationship,” Derek calls.

“Not for you, though,” Laura says, still smiling at Derek in that special older sibling way that’s equal parts condescending and caring. “I watched you break hearts left and right in college. Never affected you in the slightest.”

“If you’re talking about Paige--.”

“Oh, please, you didn’t break Paige’s heart,” Laura snorts. “She realized that she could do better than someone faking every other orgasm and moved on. And even that surprised you but didn’t really _upset_ you. How is she, by the way?”

“She’s great. Tucker turned two last week, there are pictures on Facebook.”

Cora breezes back into the room, handing Derek reheated food and a fresh beer. She keeps her refilled wine glass and settles back onto the carpet. “Going to Stiles’ graduation and his dad’s funeral kind of screams _boyfriend_. Albeit in a creepy, stalker-ish way.”

“I hate both of you,” Derek declares. “I don’t love Stiles. We barely tolerate one another.”

“ _He_ barely tolerates _you_ ,” Laura corrects. “And rightfully so – as we’ve already determined, you’re a heartless bastard.”

“There’s no point in talking about any of this anyway,” Derek says, starting to get frustrated. “Even if – _even if_ I had a thing for Stiles, I still need to marry a woman to kill the rumors if I want to be governor.”

“Do you?” Cora asks.

“What?”

“Do you actually want to be governor?”

Derek rubs the space between his eyebrows. “Stiles asked me that too. Why doesn’t anyone believe I want to be governor?”

“Probably because you never expressed the slightest interest in it before Mom brought it up as an idea on the Fourth of July,” Cora says.

“You do seem awfully happy at HaleEnt DC,” Laura hums. “And the investors love you.”

“One of my friends in R&D thinks you’re an awesome boss,” Cora adds. “And he was way too drunk to be lying.”

“I do love HaleEnt,” Derek says. “But becoming governor is a stepping stone to being a senator someday, maybe a Secretary of something, or hey, putting another Hale in the White House.”

“That sounds a hell of a lot like Mom’s dream _for_ you,” Laura says. “Actually, that sounds like Mom’s dream for _me_ before I realized I like the behind-the-scenes action more. She wants one of us to carry on the Hale legacy.”

“My dream is allowed to be the same as Mom’s dream for me,” Derek points out. “I _want_ to be governor. I’m _going_ to be governor. End of story.”

All three Hales are silent for a few minutes, stewing in their own thoughts. Eventually Laura turns on the TV, low-volume late night news, and Cora falls asleep curled up on the carpet.

“Even if I didn’t want it,” Derek says quietly as the eleven o’clock shows start. “I’m not saying that I don’t, but even if I didn’t want the wife, the governor’s mansion, the career in politics, if I gave it all up for Stiles – I’d still have to get him to forgive me. And seeing as I was and am the biggest asshole in his life, I can’t see that happening.”

“Yeah, maybe, but two things,” Laura says, eyes barely visible above a blanket. “One, if you’re going to give it up, you’re not allowed to do that _for_ Stiles, or for anyone else. If you decide to stay at HaleEnt, or move to France to become a chef, or go back to New Orleans and join a jazz band, you do it because _you want to_.”

“Fair. Two?”

“You told me once that Stiles was the best person you’d ever known. Still true?”

Derek considers. Stiles has changed since the campaign – grown up, obviously, but also become more confident, more controlled, more commanding. He accepted the job helping Derek, and he’s managing to treat Derek civilly.

“I think so.”

“Then he’s probably already forgiven you. Remember that I know the kid too, D, maybe even better than you in some aspects, since I worked with him when he was White House Press Secretary. He’s all about second chances and forgiveness and redemption. Don’t get me wrong, he’s probably still mad – might be for the rest of his life, might not ever really _forget_. But forgiveness he can do. Just, you know, be worthy.”

 

**October, Talia Hale’s Campaign (4 years ago)**

It’s common knowledge that everyone on a presidential campaign team hates each other by the second Presidential Debate.

The Hale/McKinney team is no exception.

“I can’t do it,” Stiles says, barging into Derek’s hotel room at 10:30 the night before the second debate. “I can’t work with Greenberg anymore, I just can’t.”

“McKinney’s Press Secretary?” Derek asks, shutting his laptop and snickering as Stiles throws himself face-first onto the mattress.

“He’s an _imbecile_ ,” Stiles groans into the comforter. “It’s like he thinks we can just make up messages on the spot.” He flops around until he’s lying on his back, then smiles cheekily at Derek. “Also, this time zone is ridiculous and I hate the east coast and I hate New York City. Want to distract me?”

As per usual, Derek’s body responds favorably to the sight of Stiles in his bed. He stands and strips off his shirt, padding slowly across the carpet. When he gets to the foot of the bed, he lets himself tip forward over Stiles, catching himself just before impact with a hand on either side of Stiles’ hand. “Will this do as a distraction?”

Stiles giggles – because Stiles _giggles_ , because Stiles oscillates so rapidly between insanely fucking adorable and insanely fucking hot that Derek gets dizzy trying to make sense of it – and runs his hands down Derek’s bare chest, coming to rest on his belt buckle. “I’m sure I can make it work.”

One of Derek’s very favorite activities as of late is making Stiles come undone, and he’s getting very good at it. It’s been about a month since Laura’s birthday, so he’s had plenty of time to commit the finer workings of Stiles’ body to memory – how he groans when Derek twists his wrist just so, the endless string of blasphemies that he whispers when Derek explores with his tongue, just how far down Stiles’ blush extends when he’s worked up.

Here’s a hint: that blush extends _all_ the way.

Tonight, though, Stiles interrupts his progress, pulling him back up by the ears, rolling them over, and sitting on his chest.

Derek quirks an eyebrow at him. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

“Shut up,” Stiles laughs, pushing at his shoulder. “Semi-serious question: do Luke and Chen know about us?”

“My Secret Service guys?” Because Derek has two dedicated bodyguards now, ever since the Democratic National Convention nomination. Laura and Cora do, too – it’s surreal. He takes advantage of the position to push Stiles’ shirt off his shoulders, smirking when he sees the little line of bruises he bit and sucked into Stiles’ collarbone two nights ago. “I’m not sure. Maybe?”

“The Press Secretary/Rapid Response Lead meeting is a good cover, but they were definitely right outside the door when we, ah, entertained ourselves instead of going to lunch on Monday,” Stiles says, worry creasing his forehead.

“Hey, hey,” Derek chides, roughly flipping them back and pressing Stiles into the mattress. “Aren’t I supposed to be distracting you from your worries?”

“You are,” Stiles says, his voice hitching when Derek lightly bites one of the existing bruises and drawing out the last word for a couple extra syllables. “But isn’t this really _your_ worry? You’re the one who wants to keep it a secret.”

“They’re the _Secret_ Service, Stiles,” Derek points out, pushing himself back to his knees and undoing Stiles’ belt and fly. “It’s literally in their job description to keep their mouths shut.” He taps Stiles’ hip impatiently. “Up.”

Stiles automatically lifts his hip, and Derek drags his pants and briefs down and discards them. Stiles has both his hands at his chest and is picking at his cuticles when Derek settles back between his legs, a gesture that Derek has long since learned to recognize as a tell that something is legitimately eating at him. The night the DNC announced their nomination, Stiles picked so hard that he bled all over his shirt and had to swap with an intern before going in front of the cameras.

“Hey,” Derek says, gently stilling the tiny, frantic motions. He rolls off to the side and props his head up on one hand, keeping the other on Stiles’ wrists. “What’s really going on?”

Stiles shakes his head. “No, it’s nothing, I’m sorry, I’m just being dumb.”

“Stiles,” Derek says firmly. “Talk to me.”

Stiles lets out a huff of air. “What if they know, and what if it gets out?”

Derek shrugs, aiming for nonchalant. He’s definitely not telling Stiles that he has absolutely no intention of publicly coming out, _ever_. “Then it gets out.”

Stiles turns his head to look Derek in the eye. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.” _Not just like that. I’ll deny it. Your word against mine, or my word against a bodyguard’s. And I’m Derek_ Hale _._

“You’re being way calmer about this than I expected.”

Derek shrugs again. “The election’s in three weeks. Every other card is already on the table, and my mom’s deck is pretty well stacked. Even if I get outed, she’ll win. And she wouldn’t be mad, she’s told me a million times that if I ever want to come out, I should do it, regardless of timing.”

Stiles rolls onto his side to fully face Derek. “It’s not just about the election, though. This is about you, too. I didn’t have a choice in how I came out, and it was miserable. And that was just high school. You should be able to control the how and the why, seeing as it’ll probably be a national cover story.”

Derek places his hand softly on the side of Stiles’ neck and kisses him lightly. “You’re very sweet to be concerned.”

“I’m allowed to be concerned!” Stiles mumbles against his lips. “You’re my…”

“I’m not your boyfriend, Stiles.” _I’m the jackass sleeping with you because I want it and you’re willing. You should run, you should leave while you still can._

“No, no, I know that, I get that,” Stiles babbles. “I’m allowed to be concerned about friends, though, and we’re friends.”

Derek shifts his hand to Stiles’ shoulder and uses it to push him to his back again. He walks his fingers down Stiles’ chest, playing connect-the-dots with moles along the way. “I’m pretty sure _friends_ don’t normally do that thing I did to you last Friday.”

“Okay, so, not friends,” Stiles says, his voice starting to get breathy as Derek’s fingers near their goal. “I still – care about you, though --.”

“No, you don’t,” Derek growls, flipping Stiles easily with one hand on a hip and one on his neck, pressing the man’s chest and face into the comforter. He sits on the small of Stiles’ back. “You don’t care about me, and I don’t care about you. We’re not dating, we’re not friends. That’s how this works.”

There’s color splashed across Stiles’ cheeks, but Derek’s not stupid enough to think it’s all arousal – it’s frustration, maybe anger, maybe a touch of humiliation. He tries to buck Derek off, but Derek just digs his weight into his heels a little harder.

“You can’t tell me to who care about,” Stiles says, muffled a little by the fabric.

“We have rules, Stiles. Rules that you agreed to. Do you not want to do this anymore? Do you want to stop?”

In the silence that follows his question, Derek really has no idea what he’s hoping Stiles will say. The part of him that recognizes that they’re on a bullet train heading straight for Stiles getting his heart shredded into microscopic fragments wants Stiles to say yes, put his pants on, and leave; the part of him that recognizes that and just honestly doesn’t give a fuck needs Stiles to say no, needs Stiles to stay.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Stiles finally tells the mattress, and Derek is off him and across the room before the sentence is even fully formed. He snags Stiles’ clothes from the floor and tosses them so they land against Stiles’ chest as he sits up. Stiles laughs something short and bitter and looks up at him, pain bright in his eyes. “So that’s it? If I’m not going to let you fuck me, I have to leave? Right this second?”

“Yes,” Derek says bluntly. “Besides, tomorrow’s a big day for you.”

“ _Wow_ ,” Stiles says, standing up and yanking his briefs on. “You really are a jackass at times, aren’t you?”

“You know the rules of our arrangement, and you’re the one breaking them,” Derek says. “No point being pissed at me about it.”

Stiles just stares at him, silently fuming, while he zips up and tucks his shirt in. He makes it halfway to the door before pivoting on his heel and launching himself at Derek, catching him off-balance in a moment of surprise and sending them both crashing to the floor. Stiles lands with the upper hand and kisses Derek fiercely, sealing them together with fingers locked into the hair at the base of Derek’s skull. When he lets go, Derek’s too stunned to think.

“I don’t care that you’re a jackass,” Stiles says, brown eyes locking on Derek’s face. “I don’t care that you have to say you don’t have feelings for me so you don’t freak out. I don’t care that you are so pathologically damaged from disconnecting sex and emotions that you don’t understand that you and I are in a relationship, but we _are_. I’ve done friends with benefits, I’ve done casual sex, but this is not that. Deny it all you want, but you care about me, and I care about you, and we are in a goddamned relationship.”

The next thing Derek knows, Stiles is on his feet. Derek manages to sit up just in time to see Stiles pause with his hand on the doorknob and half-turn back.

“Oh, and Derek? Bit of advice. Don’t _ever_ mistake the fact that you know how to make me come three times in one night for actually _understanding_ me as a person.”

He flashes a bright smile. The door slams behind him.

 

***

“Have I mentioned that you’re a jackass?” Laura says a week and a half later, when the campaign team is celebrating McKinney’s performance in the Vice Presidential Debate by renting out another bar (in Charlotte this time). This is the first chance Derek’s had to update his sisters on the thing with Stiles since the night in NYC, and the three of them are squirreled away in the back corner of the bar, hoarding peanuts and some imported IPA that Derek kind of hates but is tolerating because it is blessed, blessed alcohol.

“At least twice a day ever since I starting sleeping with him,” Derek confirms.

"Good,” Laura nods. “It’s still true. I really don’t like this, Derek – he’s getting attached, and you’re eventually going to break it off for some reason that will probably be stupid and petty, and then his Spice-Girls-singing, puppy-cuddling little heart is going to shatter.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Cora says, not looking up from where she’s pulverizing peanut shells into dust using her beer bottle. “You said he actually told you that you’re in a relationship?”

 Derek grunts an affirmation.

“Is he right?”

Derek throws a peanut at her head. She deflects it with the easy reflexes of someone who spent her formative years playing field hockey and lacrosse and polo and other slightly pretentious people-with-money sports at the best private schools in the country. “No, he’s not right. It’s just sex. In case you forgot, I spent the last four years as a closeted gay guy in the Air Force. I’ve got a lot of pent-up…”

He searches for the right word, but Laura waves a hand and pulls a disgusted face. “For the love of all things holy, do not finish that sentence. There are details a girl definitely doesn’t need to know about her brother’s sex life.”

“Really? Because I was starting to think the two of you have no concept of boundaries whatsoever.”

“One last question, then we’ll call it quits for the night,” Cora says. “You guys haven’t been together since that night?”

Derek smashes a few peanut shells open with the heel of his hand. “No. He hasn’t come to my room, hasn’t been in his the few times I’ve gone to check. Now, can we _please_ drop this?”

“Can we please drop what?” Stiles materializes at Derek’s elbow and slides onto the bench next to him, stealing Laura’s beer and taking a sip. “Ugh, this is awful. Why are we drinking this?”

“If it’s so awful, you’re welcome to find a different drink elsewhere,” Laura retorts, swiping the bottle back. “Where’ve you been?”

“Oh, I was, uh, waiting for an email,” Stiles says evasively, reaching for Cora’s beer and hissing when she slaps his fingers away. Derek tries not to think about Stiles’ leg bouncing next to his, brushing against his knee every few seconds.

“What email?”

“The, uh, one that tells you that the bar results have been posted,” Stiles says, unable to stop the sheepish grin that spreads across his face.

“You took the _bar_ exam?” Derek asks, shocked.

“Wait, did you pass?” Laura demands.

“You’re not even done with law school,” Cora adds.

Stiles squints around at all of them. “Did you practice that?”

“ _Stiles_ ,” all three Hales chorus.

“Okay, okay,” Stiles laughs. “You don’t have to go to law school to take the bar, you just need to work with a judge or someone who’ll sponsor a four-year course of study. I started clerking when I was 18, and Judge Resaca loves me. So yes, I took the bar again – remember me taking off those couple days in July? And yes, I passed.”

“Took the bar _again_?” Derek says, honing in.

Stiles takes another stolen swallow of beer, Derek’s this time. “Yup. I’m already admitted to the bar in California – did that in February, just before I joined the campaign. This was to get admitted in Virginia, too – it’s close enough for now, until I graduate.”

“Why Virginia?” Cora asks.

“Because the best way to practice law in DC is to waive in from whatever state’s bar you’re admitted to, but you actually _do_ have to have your J.D. to do that,” Stiles says.

“Stiles,” Laura says slowly. “If this is the part where you tell us you’re leaving the campaign? I’m not above ripping your spleen out of your body right here on this table if that’s the case.”

Derek’s heart might be trying to escape his ribcage.

“No!” Stiles exclaims. “God, no. It’s just…shit, this is embarrassing. I was hoping Deaton would ask me to stay on after the election, okay? I thought I was doing pretty well and had impressed Deaton and your parents, and I thought he might ask me to actually be a part of the White House staff. Maybe not full Press Secretary since I’m still so young, but as an assistant or a speech writer or a policy analyst or something. So I thought I’d just put my degree on semi-permanent hold, but still needed to take an east coast version of the bar and prove my knowledge of area-specific topics so I’d have _some_ legitimacy.”

Stiles drops his forehead to the table, then sighs and rolls slightly so his ear is pressed into Cora’s peanut dust. “ _But_ Deaton had a little chat with me after dinner, and it’s not going to happen. Too young, too inexperienced, haven’t been with the team long enough. Basically, he told me to take my sorry ass back to California the day after the election and finish law school.”

“Harsh,” Derek says reflexively.

“And _stupid_ ,” Laura declares, looking a little outraged. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to this campaign. Who’s he going to make Press Secretary if not you?”

Stiles chases a stray peanut around the table with his tongue.  “Greenberg.”

“ _Greenberg_?” Laura practically shrieks. “The one who got so nervous during prep tonight that _you_ had to take over _his guy’s_ spin room?”

"Yup.”

“Does Deaton _know_ what happened?”

Derek bites back a laugh, remembering the scene from earlier. Greenberg worked himself into such an anxious mess that he puked all over another staffer’s shoes and couldn’t stop shaking long enough to stand in front of the cameras. Kayla Botts, McKinney’s Chief of Staff, had snatched Stiles and put him in charge of the dreaded spin room, where all the reporters gathered to watch the debate and pelt the staff with questions.

Watching Stiles casually run circles around the press is something that Derek acknowledges as a major turn-on in regular circumstances. Watching Stiles somehow still casually run circles around the press when he hasn’t read the candidate’s remarks beforehand, hasn’t prepped for the questions, and hasn’t worked directly with the three junior members of McKinney’s press team before?

Derek doesn’t really have words for that one.

“Deaton knows,” Stiles says. “He saw the b-reels.”

"I’ll talk to him,” Laura promise.

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” Stiles says, sitting upright. “I mean, worry about the fact that Greenburg’s going to be in charge of your mom’s press because that guy’s a walking disaster, but don’t push him on my behalf. I’ll go back to Stanford, finish my degree, and maybe join you guys for your mom’s reelection bid.”

“And not see us for three years?” Cora says, pouting melodramatically.

“There are these great things called _planes_ , Cora, and – hey! No throwing peanuts at the guy who’s twice-admitted to the bar!”

 

***

 

It’s well past midnight when Derek slips past Chen with some lame excuse and tiptoes down the hall to Stiles’ hotel room. Stiles lets him in, all the lights in the room still on, a half cup of steaming coffee next to Stile’s open laptop.

“You’re working?” Derek asks incredulously. “Now?”

Stiles yawns as he shuffles back to the desk. “Yup. Do you really think I’m going to let Greenberg take over without putting backups in place? I’m tagging all the statements I’d already been working on for the transition and the first hundred days for Maddie.”

“Maddie’s your assistant, right?”

“Yeah, but that makes her sound like a secretary – she’s more of a deputy. I figure I’ve got three weeks to flesh all of this out and prep her as best I can so she can keep the ship running smoothly when Greenberg inevitably drops the ball.”

Derek stares, kind of in awe, doing his level best to ignore the way his stomach dropped when Stiles said _three weeks_. “You’re a little amazing, you know that?”

Stiles snorts. “Please. I’m full-on amazing. Anyway, what brings you to my neck of the woods?”

Derek smiles. “I think passing the bar twice deserves some sort of reward, don’t you?”

Stiles throws back his head and laughs, a sound that’s entirely too loud for paper-thin hotel walls at one in the morning. “Can I take a raincheck? No offense to you and your wonderdick, of course, but I’ve kind of had a rollercoaster of a day and I need to get through some more of this before I crash for a few hours.”

Derek stands, rolling his shoulders out, consciously blocking himself from feeling put out. “No problem.”

“Whoa, hey, I didn’t mean you have to leave,” Stiles says. “I’m just going to work for a bit and then pass out, but you could…you could stay. If you want.”

Derek lowers himself back to the bed an inch at a time, giving Stiles every opportunity to take back the offer. When Stiles just returns to paging through documents on his computer, Derek kicks his shoes off, folds his pants over the dresser, and settles back against the headboard. “Got a book?”

"Drawer of the bedside table.”

“You’re reading _The Count of Monte Cristo_? And _Fight Club_?”

“’Life is a storm, my young friend,’” Stiles intones, “’You will bask in the sunlight one moment, and be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must shout as you did in Rome: Do your worst, for I shall do mine.’”

“Pretty.”

“Accurate. Also, ‘I am Joe’s smirking revenge.’”

“What?”

“Shut up and read.”

 

***

 

Forty-eight hours later, he rolls Stiles out from under him, sweaty and wrung to pieces, and asks if making Stiles come _four_ times in a night means that Derek understands him as a person now. Stiles punches him weakly in the shoulder.

 

***

 

For the next nineteen days, Luke and Chen look for Derek in Stiles’ room if they can’t find him in his own bed in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU GUYS. I am OVERWHELMED by the response to the last chapter. Thank you so, so much for your awesome feedback and your kudos and your reads. It makes me happier than I can even say that this little sprout of an idea is loved by people other than me :)
> 
> A current!Derek POV excerpt at last! Love it, hate it, miss Stiles? 
> 
> Couple quotes to attribute in this chapter, and read both of these books pretty much immediately if you haven't yet: 
> 
> Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, and be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must shout as you did in Rome: Do your worst, for I shall do mine.  
> -Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
> 
> I am Jack's smirking revenge.  
> -Chuck Palahnuik, Fight Club
> 
> Chapter title is a lyric from Take Off Your Sunglasses, by Ezra Furman and His Boyfriends.


	4. at most, i'm sleeping all my demons away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “No, I just, uh,” Stiles tries, inwardly cringing when he realizes that he sounds like his 23-year-old self again, constantly nervous, trying to impress the Hale dynasty during his first week on the job. He is not that person anymore, damnit. He is Stiles fucking Stilinski. He leads Stilinski & Associates to victory over (and sometimes for) the most powerful people in the country. He takes a breath and squares his shoulders. “I came from talking to your mother. She told me she showed the numbers that prove you might win Louisiana if you come out, so I want to know why we’re doing this.”
> 
> In the heavy moment that follows, Laura says, “I’m just going to shut the door."

**October, Year Three of Talia Hale’s First Term**

Stiles is reviewing Lydia’s case report on Senator Wallace’s illegitimate child when he notices the two dark suits standing at the door to his office.

“Erica,” he says, nodding at the one he recognizes. “What can I do for you?”

“There’s a car waiting for you downstairs, sir,” Erica, one of the Secret Service agents who’s been on the president’s detail since the beginning, responds.

“Of course there is,” Stiles sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose in an attempt to ward off his mounting headache. “Where’s this car taking me?”

“To the Oval Office, sir.”

“Of _course_ ,” Stiles mutters. “I’ll be down in five minutes. Man-Erica, you can stay.”

“Boyd, sir,” the other agent says, waiting for a confirming nod from Erica, who heads out the way she came.

“Boyd,” Stiles repeats. “When’d you join the president’s service?” He sweeps the remains of his lunch into the trashcan and sets to re-encrypting Lydia’s document.

“About a year ago, Mr. Stilinski. When I came back from Bahrain.”

Stiles winces internally. “Bahrain, huh? Not exactly a pleasant place to be these days.”

“Not so bad as some, sir.”

“I’ll give you five dollars to call me _Stiles_ in front of Erica. Just once.”

“I’ll pass, sir.”

“I’ve made that offer to every agent I’ve ever met, and they’ve all turned me down.” The file containing Lydia’s report flashes once on screen – encryption complete.

“I know, sir. You have a certain reputation in the agency.”

“You’re _kidding_. You guys sit around and gossip about your protectees? Doesn’t that violate basically everything you stand for?”

“With all due respect, Mr. Stilinski, you’re not a protectee, you’re just an asset.”

“Damn right I am. Do you know how long this is going to take? I have another meeting at 3:30.”

Boyd glances at his watch. “We should have you back by 3, sir.”

“Great.” Stiles scribbles _@WH, back at 3_ on a Post-it and sticks to his computer screen before shutting down.

 

***

 

It’s not like this is the first time Stiles has been called to the Oval Office. He was White House Press Secretary for nine months; he spent his fair share of time in the Oval dealing with situations that should, logically, be far more intimidating than this. Still, this is the first time he’s even set foot on the grounds in a year and a half. He lets himself reminisce as he follows Boyd through the building, automatically smiling and returning greetings from all the familiar faces.  The hallway where he and Deaton got into their first real fight over how to message their nuclear policy changes. The portico where he’d shaken hands with the Indian Prime Minister. Two lefts, a right, a security guard, and three more lefts from here is his old office. Some of the faces and paintings are different, but at its bones, this place is the same it has always been.

Swallowing down his rush of patriotic pride, he focuses on keeping up with Boyd. That’s another thing he tells himself he’s glad he doesn’t have to deal with anymore – the weight and history of a place like the White House can sneak up on a guy.

“Is she ready for him, Patricia?” Boyd asks the woman sitting outside Oval’s door, checking his watch for the seventh time since they cleared the gates.

“Go ahead in,” Patricia says, smiling. “She’s on the phone with the First Gentleman, but said you shouldn’t wait.”

“I’ll be here when you’re done,” Boyd promises. Stiles manages not to roll his eyes through sheer force of self-training – honestly, he _knows_ how a Secret Service escort works – and steps through, pulling the door closed behind him.

As always, he has to take a couple breaths to steady himself when his feet touch the carpet. No matter how many times he’s here, no matter how many important public figures he deals with, Stiles doesn’t think he’ll ever quite get over this room and the gravitas that seems to be built into its foundation. He _knows_ he’ll never get over it, actually, because this is the room that drove 8-year-old Stiles to do his biography project on the Secretary of State instead of the astronauts and singers and actors that his classmates picked. This room is the reason he persuaded his sixth grade English teacher to let him do a book report on the Constitution. This room is in the background of every special presidential address he watched with atypical rapture growing up.

This is the room where he was offered White House Press Secretary two weeks before law school graduation, and this is the room where he tendered his resignation nine months, one week, and two days later.

The president is, as Patricia said, on the phone when he walks in. She waves him to one of the couches and he sits, occupying himself by looking around the room and trying to identify any small details that might have changed.

“I will, David, it’s just a logistics problem,” Talia says into the phone. “Yes, I’ll let him know. Travel safe, I’ll see you tonight.”

“The First Gentleman on his way back from Tallahassee?” Stiles asks, rising to shake her hand when Talia comes around the desk.

"By way of Richmond, to have dinner with his mother,” she answers, sinking to the couch opposite Stiles. “How have you been?”

“Very well, Madam President, thank you for asking. I trust you’re well?”

“I’d be better if the Republicans in Congress would stop blocking the gun control bill, but that’s not a surprise to anyone.”

Stiles’ brain – maybe conditioned by his time here, maybe just stuck at its highest level of functioning since the president and Derek walked back into his life – whirs.   “Lean on Senators Kenney and Ronaldo. Kenney’s district had that awful shooting back in March, and Ronaldo’s still smoothing over that incident at the border – well, S&A is still smoothing it over _for_ him, actually. If you can get them to swing over, they’ll bring their friends.”

“Noted,” Talia says, a hint of a smile gracing her lips. “We were idiots to let you go, weren’t we?”

Stiles coughs a little, clearing his throat. “With all due respect, Madam President, you didn’t let me go. I left.”

“Yes,” she cedes, folding her hands in her lap. “Yes, I suppose you did. Now, Derek tells me he’s met three candidates so far and none of them have been suitable matches. We’re paying your rather exorbitant fees. I expected better results.”

 _Ah,_ there _it is_. Stiles had been wondering when the act was going to drop. Talia Hale could play up her southern gentility with the best of them, but the claws came out when she felt she needed them.

“I don’t believe the problem is the women,” Stiles says, choosing his words carefully. And it’s true – all three had been carefully vetted and pleasant to talk to. They’d dropped Sofia Ruiz from the list in favor of a newcomer from Texas with a whip-smart brain and connections in big oil, but Derek had claimed she was even worse than Rose.

“So you’re saying my son is the problem?” Talia asks with a raised eyebrow, voice a knife coated in honey.

“He’s having some trouble connecting,” Stiles says. “At the very least, he and Chelsea could have been good friends in a mutually beneficial partnership; Mr. Hale refused a second date because Ms. Brighton couldn’t name a comic book villain.”

Talia, after a moment’s pause, lets out a very un-presidential laugh, and for a second the years and stress of her office drop away. “Of course he did,” she says. “Of course.”

“Respectfully, Madam President,” Stiles says, “are you still certain this is the best course of action? Derek isn’t really _trying_ – his heart doesn’t seem to be in it.”

“Allow me to make something clear,” Talia says. “I don’t want this for Derek. A lifetime of lies and never truly knowing what it’s like to have a partner that you love and trust above all else? I don’t want that for him. No mother wants that for her child.”  

“So why do it?”

She sighs a little and fiddles with her wedding band. “Because I don’t have the luxury of thinking like his mother. I’m the president first, and everything else second. I have high enough approval ratings that my reelection is as much a sure thing as it ever is, so I can afford to plan for the long-term. Putting my son, a Democrat director of the largest green technology and energy business in the country, in the governor’s seat of Louisiana could open doors that the White House hasn’t had access to in decades. So I asked Derek to run for governor. And when the pictures were discovered…”

“…you came to me,” Stiles finishes.

She nods. “We came to you.”

“And it’s important enough to both of you that you’re willing to lie to the entire country rather than risk him losing if he comes out?”

Talia’s eyes flash. “Be careful how you speak to me in this office, Stiles.”

Stiles’ eyes flash right back. “My team and I are exceptional, Madam President. You are underutilizing us and selling Derek short.”

“I did not--!” She starts, shouting, then catches herself and lowers her tone. “I did not ask him to do this. I told him, as I have _always_ told him, that if he ever wants to make his personal life public, I will stand in full support of him. I told him that I believe he could win either way. I had staffers run projections and do straw polls for a hypothetical gay candidate in Louisiana before Derek announced his candidacy, just to show him the numbers and prove the possibility. I _did not ask him_ to do this. This is his choice.”

Stiles reels. “I see.”

Talia tilts her head a little, studying him. “I know about the two of you, you know.”

“Madam President?”

“Laura told me. She didn’t mean to, she was just trying to explain why Derek was so reticent after Election Day and I got it out of her.”

“Madam President, I --.”

“Stop,” she says, holding up a hand. “I’m not upset or offended. I just thought you should know that I know, seeing as how you uphold honesty as your one banner. Now, I have a meeting with the Joint Chiefs in ten minutes. I’ll walk you out.”  

 

***

“Back to your office, Mr. Stilinski?” Erica says, steering ably through a mid-afternoon rush. Stiles had followed Boyd back to the car in a daze, trying to wrap his head around everything the president had said.

“Actually, can we make a pit stop at the HaleEnt DC complex?”

 

***

Hale Enterprise DC’s buildings take up a square mile of land just over the border in Virginia. Stiles hasn’t been to this complex before, but knows a fair amount about how HaleEnt is structured, so he can pick out the three primary R&D buildings, the test track where they race experimental models of environmentally-friendly cars, and the satellite marketing HQ (the main Sales & Marketing branch is located in HaleEnt Chicago). Erica drops Stiles off outside the HR & Management building, then swings around and heads for the test track.

Stiles takes his time on the way in. He stops in front of a map of the world on one wall of the lobby, where blinking lights show temporary HaleEnt projects and steady lights represent permanent installations. Little scrolling captions give clues about what goes on at each: HaleEnt Seattle, Manufacturing. HaleEnt NOLA, Company Headquarters. HaleEnt Amsterdam, their first overseas expansion that Stiles remembers reading about two years ago. HaleEnt Houston, the other R&D hub.

“Stiles?”

Stiles whirls, caught off guard. “Laura?”

The older Hale sister envelops him in a hug, grinning wildly. “What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in ages!”

“Oh, uh, I’m working with Derek on something,” he says, hugging back. “Not since the Christmas party, right?”

“I know about the marriage thing,” Laura says under her breath. “Are you here to beat him over the head about it, too?” She leads him into the elevator, waving at the receptionist on the way.

“No, I just need to talk to him,” Stiles says, letting himself by pulled along by the elbow. “Are you really beating him over the head?”

“Not so much anymore. We had a heart-to-heart, I think he just needs to time to figure things out.” Laura punches the button for the top floor. “I’m taking him out for a late lunch, but you guys can talk if you need. I’ll order in.”

“Oh no, that’s fine,” Stiles says. “I can talk to him tomorrow.”

But the door are already opening, and Laura is pulling him out of the elevator and down the hall. “Don’t be silly. You’re here, he’s here, I’m here, we can all have a friendly chat. Have you seen his office? It’s the shit.”

Stiles likes to think of himself as a fairly strong person these days. Physically strong, since he actually committed to boxing and joined Scott’s gym. Intellectually strong, since he maintains admittance to the bar in three states and occasionally trounces Jackson or other ADAs in a pro-bono case when he’s feeling bored. Emotionally strong, since he picked himself the fuck up after his first go-round with the Hales and moved on with his life.

But even if Stiles is a great white shark, Laura can be a goddamned fucking megalodon when she sets her mind to something. So Stiles finds himself tugged bodily past Chen, stationed at the end of the hall, and into Derek’s gorgeous corner office with a view of a test track (and yup, that’s Erica taking corners at 120MPH in a Chevy Malibu, racing another definitely-not-racetrack-approved car that Stiles guesses contains Laura’s Secret Service contingent) while Laura waltzes a step ahead of him, singing, “Derek! I’m here!”

"Okay, Laur, just give me a second to finish this up,” Derek calls from his desk, nose inches away from something that he’s marking painstakingly with a red pen.

“I brought company,” Laura continues, pulling Stiles up next to her and slinging an arm around his shoulders. Derek looks up and his pen skids across the paper.

Stiles _hates_ Laura sometimes.

 “Stiles!” Derek says, immediately standing up. “Did we – did we have an appointment?”

“No, I just, uh,” Stiles tries, inwardly cringing when he realizes that he sounds like his 23-year-old self again, constantly nervous, trying to impress the Hale dynasty during his first week on the job. He is _not_ that person anymore, damnit. He is Stiles fucking Stilinski. He leads Stilinski  & Associates to victory over (and sometimes for) the most powerful people in the country. He takes a breath and squares his shoulders. “I came from talking to your mother. She told me she showed the numbers that prove you might win Louisiana if you come out, so I want to know why we’re doing this.”

In the heavy moment that follows, Laura says, “I’m just going to shut the door,” does so, and takes a seat midway between them so she has a good view.

“It’d be a long shot,” Derek says slowly. “The numbers showed that it was possible, not that it was likely.”

“You lied to me,” Stiles shoots back. “That first day in my office, I told you that the only thing I required of my clients is honesty, and you _lied_ to me and told me that you didn’t believe you could win Louisiana gay.”

“It wasn’t a lie,” Derek retorts. “I _don’t_ believe it. I just said, the numbers showed _possible_ , not _likely_.”

“The numbers don’t take _me_ into account,” Stiles says sharply.

“Oh, so _you_ could get me elected?” Derek laughs.

“Yes!” Stiles exclaims. “Yes, I could, and I _told you that_. Me, the numbers, and the President of the United States are telling you that it’s possible and you’re still not budging, so there’s obviously something else at play here. S &A has never, _never_ failed a client, and we are not going to start because you refuse to pull your head out of your ass and tell me the truth about whatever is going on with you. ”        

“I should have brought popcorn,” Laura whispers, eyes twinkling.

“ _Laura_!” Stiles and Derek shout together.

“If this is about me not liking the women, Stiles,” Derek begins, but Stiles cuts him off.

“Yes, let’s talk about the women!” Stiles says. “We’ve presented intelligent, attractive, kind, charismatic women. They’ve been community leaders, passionate about their fields, amenable to the idea of spending the rest of their lives with a closeted gay man because this is Washington, DC, and we do what we can for the good of the republic. And you have shot _every one_ of them down without so much as a _flicker_ of hesitation. So either _tell me_ what you’re looking for, or confess that you’re still just too scared to come out of the closet.” Stiles blinks, replaying his last words in his head and lining them up with the things Derek had said on Election Day. He drops his voice several decibels. “And it’s _fine_ , if that’s the case. If you’re honestly just not ready, that’s okay.”

“It’s not that,” Derek spits, and just like that Stiles’ temper is back up.

“Then _what_ , Derek, what do you _want_ in one of these women?”

“I told you after the second one, someone who can name DC villains--.”

“I swear to _God_ if you try to blame this on lack of comic book knowledge one more time, you’ll be finding someone else to handle your dirty laundry.”

“Someone who can quote Charles Dickens and – and – and Shel Silverstein at the drop of a hat!” Derek roars. “Someone who doesn’t defer to me just because of my last name, someone who has the same taste in beer as me, someone who talks through movies and always leaves a handful of pretzels at the bottom of the bag and laughs like they’re exploding. Okay? Are you happy now?”

Derek violently pushes himself out from behind his desk, stalks toward a side door, and slams it behind him, leaving Stiles staring at the shaking door frame.

“You’re aware that he just described you to a T, right?” Laura says once the deafening silence has died down a little.

“I have to go,” Stiles mutters. He makes it all the way back to S&A blindly, conducts his 3:30 meeting on autopilot, then takes himself on the longest run he’s been on in months, using the burn in his lungs and his legs to drown out his looping memories.

 

**May, Year One of Talia Hale’s First Term (2.45 years ago)**

To be honest, Derek’s not sure why he’s here. Stiles had added the date of his Stanford Law graduation to Derek’s phone calendar back in August of last year (along with recurring reminders for Stiles’ birthday and National Star Wars Day) , but that doesn’t explain why Derek is actually _here_ – sitting in the small crowd that’s gathered for the law school-specific ceremony, scanning the rows of identical caps and academic hoods.

 _It was convenient_ , he supposes, ignoring whatever speaker is droning on about the responsibility of upholding the law. He’s in the off week between his spring and summer semesters at Harvard (and definitely not looking forward to another full load of credits as he compresses a two-year program into a year and a half, making up for the semester he missed for the campaign), so he had the time. Luke and Chen (both in plainclothes, Chen sitting next to him while Luke monitors the exits) had approved the trip after consulting with the university’s security team. He genuinely likes Palo Alto, and Daniel’s stationed at Vandenberg.

None of these explain why Derek is actually _here_ , though, attending a graduation ceremony for a guy he’d absolutely destroyed the last time they’d been in a room together. He knows Stiles is moving to DC after graduation and taking over as White House Press Secretary, and their chances of running into one another whenever Derek’s in town for state functions is pretty high, so maybe Derek can use this to test the waters. Start rebuilding the bridges he’d so spectacularly set on fire during the celebration on Election Day. Give Stiles his first in-person apology, because the countless unanswered texts and emails and voicemails he’d left don’t cut it.

He shouldn’t be surprised, really, that Stiles is valedictorian. His speech is witty and poignant, flowing and direct, and Derek laughs and sighs along with the crowd at the appropriate moments. _Look, Ma, I’m a real boy_.

“Of course, we didn’t make it to this moment on our own,” Stiles concludes. “We are blessed to have the finest staff and faculty in the country, so to our professors and T.A.’s, our Mock Trial and Law Review advisors, all the judges and clerks and policemen that have helped us grow – thank you. To the members of last year’s graduating class,” Stiles continues, grinning when there’s some whooping from the back corner of the room, “thanks for offering your guidance, even after Scott and I ditched you for the campaign trail. To Scottie,” he says, winking down at the man sitting next to his own empty chair, presumably second in the class, “better luck next time. To the incomparable Miss Lydia Martin, who led Harvard Law’s Mock Trial team against us in a valiant fight, and came here today to support us before her own graduation tomorrow, thank you,” he goes on, smiling at a stunning redhead seated a few rows back from the graduates. Derek wonders if he’s ever walked past her on campus and just not known. “And, finally, to my father, Sherriff John Stilinski.” The older man next to Lydia turns red, and although Derek’s too far away to see for sure, he’s guessing there are tears involved. “You taught me everything I know about being a man of the law and a man of my word. Thank you. Also, thank you for dropping the charges against me for borrowing your car without asking, because I’m pretty sure Stanford doesn’t admit people with grand theft auto on their records.”

There’s another round of laughter. Stiles spreads his arms wide like a benediction and smiles down at his classmates. “So tonight, my friends, celebrate, because we now go out into the world as graduates of Stanford Law.  To paraphrase the immortal Judge Dredd, WE ARE THE LAW! Congratulations, Stanford Law School graduating class!”

They make eye contact once in the chaos that follows. The university hosts a reception on the lawn, and Derek watches from the shade of a tree on the outskirts as Stiles shakes hands with well-wishers, hugs his father, laughs with Lydia and Scott and his other friends. He should go say congratulations, he should give Stiles the card that he spent literal hours writing, he should introduce himself in person to the sheriff he heard so many stories about during the campaign and actually met once, when he poked his head into Stiles’ room while he was Skyping with his father. He should thank Scott for being the man inside Talbot’s camp that alerted Stiles that Talbot planned to out Derek on national television, tell him that Derek feels like he knows him from all the stories Stiles told about his best friend.

He should do all of these things – but he doesn’t. Instead, he stands against the tree, just watching, until Stiles turns his head to respond to someone shouting his name and his eyes lock onto Derek.

It’s the longest couple seconds in Derek’s recent memory. Stiles’ smile drops, looking like he got the wind knocked out of him. Derek gives a tiny half-wave and mouths, “Congratulations.” Then Scott’s arm is around Stiles’ neck again, their eye contact breaks, and Derek starts walking back to the parking lot.

He mails the card.

He doesn’t hear back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING. Your comments and kudos and reads keep me chug-chug-chugging along. 
> 
> Forever and always open to suggestions, bunnies, and feedback. And if there's anyone out there who wants to actively hate canon!Fitz with me, that'd be great, because he makes my skin crawl.
> 
> Chapter title is from Ghost by Ella Henderson.


	5. so raise a glass to the turning of the seasons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m not talking business,” Scott says, bounding back in. “I’m talking personal. You’re being an idiot about this personally. You haven’t been an idiot about something professional since you asked Lydia to marry you in the Mock Trial courtroom before closing statements.”
> 
> “That was a carefully crafted distraction technique,” Stiles defends. “And she almost said yes. And I’d argue that it was actually quite personal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Panic attack trigger warning in the second half of this - proceed with caution!

**November, Year Three of Talia Hale’s First Term**

 Lydia hums. “What about Kate Argent?”

It’s been three days since Stiles’ meeting with the president and subsequent knock-down-drag-out with Derek. In those three days, Stiles officially sealed Lydia’s Senator Wallace case, used the deleted texts Isaac mined from a discarded burner phone to catch the journalist threatening to slander a local CEO in a lie, cleaned his entire apartment, met with two upcoming candidates who want him to run their campaigns, watched twelve episodes of Gilmore Girls without leaving his bed, and written to _The Herald_ listing the eleven typos in their most recent Sunday edition.

He hadn’t once thought about Derek. He also hadn’t slept that much.

But now it’s Friday, and the team is gathered in the main S&A conference room for their typical end-of-week case updates. Business as usual. Forge ahead.

“Senator Chris Argent’s sister?” Stiles chews on the tip of his pen absently, thinking. “What do we know about her? Kira?”

“Twenty-nine,” Kira says promptly, fingers whirring over her two keyboards and eyes flicking between monitors. “Got her MD from Yale, did Doctors Without Borders for a few years, now a resident at Inova Fairfax. Registered Democrat, but strong ties to the NRA, which she probably gets from her father.”

“Her father?”

Kira flicks something on her tablet, and a life-size picture of a balding, elderly white man appears on the wall-mounted monitor at the head of the table.

“Gerard Argent,” Lydia takes over. “Head of the California branch of the National Rifle Association for the past 15 years. Outspoken advocate of the Second Amendment. Rumor has it that he has at least eight Democrat senators in his pocket _besides_ his son, so he’s been able to effectively block any gun control policies proposed by past presidents.”

“Can we make that work?” Stiles asks, glancing around at his team. “President Hale’s gun control bill is still tabled, and if her son starts a public relationship with the daughter of the NRA’s bulldog, people might think it means Derek isn’t as big on gun control as the president.”

“That might actually _help_ him in Louisiana,” Scott points out. “New Orleans itself is pretty liberal, but the rest of the state is about as Republican as they come.”

“Could hurt the president’s bill, though,” Stiles muses. “A household divided and all that.”

“It’s not our job to push bills through Congress,” Kira says. “Is it? Wait, have we ever done that?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to,” Isaac says under his breath.

“She’s Allison’s aunt, then?” Stiles directs at Scott. “Have you ever met her?”

“A few times,” Scott nods, face going a little moony like it always does when he’s talking about his girlfriend. “Family dinners, parties, that sort of thing. She seems nice enough, but honestly never really did anything that stood out too much. I think she made the stuffing at Thanksgiving last year, but that’s not relevant.”

“Keep digging,” Stiles says to the team in general, looking over the pictures and facts, focusing on the details. “I want to be sure she’s right before we try again. Lydia, is Jackson getting anywhere with the MacDonnell witnesses?”

"He’s an Assistant District Attorney, Stiles, not my lapdog,” Lydia says, looking unperturbed at the abrupt jump in cases up for discussion.

 

***

 

“You’re being an idiot about this,” Scott says, pausing the game and getting up to grab more paper towels. Greasy thumbs don’t make for excellent WoW maneuverability.

“I invited you here to eat pizza, drink, and battle the Dark Horde,” Stiles calls, cracking his back. “Not to talk business.”

“I’m not talking business,” Scott says, bounding back in. “I’m talking personal. You’re being an idiot about this _personally_. You haven’t been an idiot about something professional since you asked Lydia to marry you in the Mock Trial courtroom during closing statements.”

“ _That_ was a carefully crafted distraction technique,” Stiles defends. “And she almost said yes. _And_ I’d argue that it was actually quite personal.”

“You’re still being an idiot. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me that it was Derek during the campaign. Actually, I can’t believe that _I_ believed that you were so torn up over some guy from your Communications team named Terrance. Terrance, honestly? You couldn’t do any better?”

Stiles pinches a pepperoni between his fingers and pops it in his mouth. “I wasn’t the skilled mastermind then that I am today.”

They go back to the game for awhile, stopping every so often to refuel and chatter, and it strikes Stiles that he has _missed_ this. Fridays with Scott stretched back to the when they’d been on Stanford’s Prospective Students weekend as high school seniors, and both independently ditched the tours in favor of a pick-up lacrosse game they found on the quad.

(“Hey, I’m Stiles,” Stiles said, grinning at the guy playing opposite him and keeping an eye on the cross-field action. “Weren’t you at the incoming pre-law students’ dinner last night?”

“Yup, and it was almost as boring as the tour they tried to make us go on this morning. You’re from NorCal, right?” He pulls off his glove and offers his hand. “I’m Scott, from Texas.”)

These nights are rarer now that Scott has Allison, but Scott still makes the effort whenever he can, and Allison is a big supporter of their bro-time and usually takes the opportunity to claim Lydia (and Kira, now) for whatever it is women do when they get together.

Actually, knowing the three of them, it’s probably pretty similar to what Stiles and Scott are doing. Except with wine instead of beer, and Michelin-rated Allison probably puts goat cheese and foie gras on homemade pizza.

None of the others know what Isaac gets up to on nights when everyone else is in the firm is occupied. And Stiles isn’t going to tell.

Still, putting his pointless worries about Isaac aside, he’s grateful for these nights and for Scott. Scott can build him up and knock him down a few pegs, depending on what he needs, and has never been even slightly bothered by the fact that Stiles is, ostensibly, his boss.

“He doesn’t know, does he?” Scott says a while later, when their thumbs are bruised and the pizza’s down to crusts. “About the first scandal you took care of? What gave you the idea for S&A?”

“I keep telling you, Talbot trying to out him during that debate is _not_ why I started S &A. And that wasn’t even that big a deal – you, my faithful spy, made sure we killed it before it actually became a _thing_.”

“I was not your spy!” Scott exclaims. “I joined Talbot’s team because I genuinely thought he was the better candidate. Until he started doing shady, underhanded things, at which point I abandoned a sinking ship.”

“And tattled on him.”

“Yes, and tattled on him,” Scott admits. “But that’s not what I was talking about, and you know it.”

“What happened on Election Day wasn’t like that, Scott,” Stiles says, a warning in his voice. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You _never_ want to talk about it. Even when I thought it was Communications Terrance that you had to cover for, which – God, how did I _ever_ think that made sense – you wouldn’t actually talk to me about it.”

“Well, if it ain’t broke,” Stiles snarks.

“Except it _is_ broken, because you’ve been in a shitty mood for the past month.”

“Scottie, _please_ ,” Stiles says. “Can we drop it?”

 

***

 

“Here,” Stiles says, dropping Kate’s file on the table in front of Derek. “For your approval. See if she meets your prerequisites before we bring her in.”

Derek scowls, but opens the file. “Who is she?”

“Kate Argent. I’m going to skip over of her _actual_ qualifications to tell you how she fares on your extremely specific checklist of desired attributes. Number one,” Stiles says, pulling an actual piece of paper from his pocket where he’d written down all the things Derek had yelled at him that day in his office. “Quoting Dickens and Silverstein. She double-majored in English and Chemistry, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Number two, won’t defer to you because you’re a Hale – also shouldn’t be a problem. The Argents have been big names in this town for even longer than the Hales, and Kate’s got a reputation for speaking her mind. Number three, same taste in beer – keep flipping, you’ll find pictures of her home-brewing a porter with her friends in someone’s bathtub. Her niece Allison attests that she either leaves a handful of pretzels in the bottom of the bag or buys a new bag, and if you just keep flipping and you’ll find that yes, she appears to laugh like she’s exploding.”

Derek closes the file, watching Stiles like he’s a time bomb. “Okay. What’s wrong with you?”

Stiles forces himself to stay calm. “Does she seem like a good fit, Mr. Hale?”

“What? Yeah, she’s fine, I’m sure she’s fine – Stiles, what’s going on?”

“Great. Lydia will call your office to set it up.” Stiles sweeps the file off the table and leaves the conference room. Lydia pursues him into his office on a two-second delay, shutting the door behind her.

“Want to tell me what that was all about?” She demands, hovering at the edge of his desk on heels that she could probably use to sever a man’s jugular.

Hell, she might have actually done that at some point. Stiles’ team can be downright terrifying when they’re ticked off. Or vengeful, in Lydia’s case.

“What all what was about?” Stiles asks, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. Another long day, another restless night. It’s becoming a pattern.

“I know you have a rule about not getting emotionally invested, Stiles, but that was a little ridiculous. You at least need to be civil. He _is_ the president’s son.”

“I was perfectly civil. I don’t have to answer personal questions asked by a client.”

She chucks a cube of Post-its at his chest. “He’s worried about you, jackass.” Then, quieter, “We’re all worried about you.”

Stiles sighs. “Take a seat, Lyds. You hovering there makes me feel like you’re about to claw my eyes out.”

“I’ve considered it,” she says primly, depositing herself gracefully into a chair. “You can be singularly frustrating. I know that you and Scott have whatever special bond you have and the rest of us don’t get to see through that frosted glass, but I can’t help you on this case unless I know what’s going on.”

“It’s complicated,” Stiles says. “It’s a long, complicated, messy tale, full of me being a lovestruck idiot. We work together, Lydia, it wouldn’t be professional.”

“We were friends before we worked together,” she says gently. “And we’re still friends now. So don’t shut me out.”

Stiles opens his mouth – to tell her the whole story, maybe, or just to thank her – but there’s a loud crash outside his door and someone shouts. By the time he makes it out to the hallway, Chen and Luke, who normally wait out by the elevator when Derek’s here, have their guns trained on Isaac, and Isaac has Derek pinned to the wall with one arm twisted up behind his back. Kira’s over by the coffeemaker looking traumatized. Lydia rushes to her, and Stiles steps slowly between Isaac and the guns.

“Someone tell me what happened,” he says, injecting calm into his voice.

“He needs to stand down, sir,” Luke says, not lowering his weapon in the slightest.

“Okay,” Stiles says. “Okay, he will. Let’s all just take a breath.” Slowly, slowly, slowly, he rotates on the spot so he’s facing Isaac. “Isaac? Can you tell me what happened?”

Isaac’s eyes are wide and his breathing is too rapid, but none of the other signs that he’s heading for a break are there. His eyes dart from the back of Derek’s head to Stiles once.

“Isaac. Talk to me.”

“Threatened Kira,” Isaac grunts at the repeated prompt. Derek starts to protest, but Isaac grinds him further into the wall and the distinct sound of someone taking off their safety clicks.

“Kira,” Stiles says, not taking his eyes off Isaac. “Did Derek threaten you?”

“It – it was a joke,” Kira says. “I asked Derek if he wanted coffee, and Derek said he’d kill for it or something--.”

“Okay, Isaac,” Stiles cuts her off, now with all the information he needs. “Did you hear that? It was a joke. Remember when we talked about reacting appropriately to social cues?”

“Social cues,” Isaac breathes, his grip starting to let up a little.

“Yes, social cues. Derek was just making a joke. He didn’t mean that he was going to hurt Kira. Derek would never hurt Kira. Right, Derek?”

“Right,” Derek grunts, and Isaac abruptly lets him go and scurries down the hall to the tech room he shares with Kira. Derek turns from the wall, rubbing his shoulder ruefully.

“Christ, Stiles. Why is everyone on your team so fucking damaged?”

 

***

 

Two days later, Derek and Kate go on their first date.

Stiles tries not to think too hard when he gets the report that it went well, and Derek would like to see her again.

 

 **August, Year One of Talia Hale’s First Term (2.2 years ago)**

Derek learns that Stiles’ father died via the Google alert he’d set up to trawl for “Stilinski,” which usually just kicks back various clips of Stiles, now fully settled into his role as White House Press Secretary. Two hours later, he, Luke, and Chen board a flight from BOS and make the drive from SFO up the coast to Beacon Hills. His rental car’s kind of crappy and traffic is bad, so they miss the first few minutes of the service as he changes out of plane clothes and into a slightly rumpled suit in the Beacon Hills First Presbyterian parking lot. Luke and Chen, of course, have been wearing their standard black suits since Boston.

The service is simple, touching, and heavy in a way that Derek can only appreciate from a removed, third party standpoint. He never actually met Sheriff Stilinski, not outside ten seconds of a Skype call Stiles had pulled him into on the campaign trail. He’s never lost anyone particularly close to him. He may have a couple dozen lawyers in his phone, but he doesn’t know anyone in this level of law enforcement well enough to have attended a funeral like this before, where the first five rows are filled with cops in dress blues and deputies in dress khakis. His only connection to this is Stiles. And Stiles gets up to speak but only manages two sentences before breaking down and being led back to his seat by a guy and a girl Derek vaguely recognizes from Stiles’ law school graduation – Scott and Lydia.

If the service is simple, touching, and heavy, the reception is messy, energetic, and raucous. It’s held in Sheriff Stilinski’s house, and there’s probably enough booze to float the entire building. Stiles, of course, gets passed around from group to group to group, so Derek occupies himself by persuading Luke and Chen to go find them a hotel for the night and get some sleep (“I’m in a house with two dozen members of local law enforcement, guys, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t get much safer than this.”), tasting a bunch of beers he’s never heard of, and mingling. After a lifetime attending political soirees, he’s more than capable of making small talk and finding common ground, and since every new wave of deputies, nurses, mailmen, and other public servants that rotate through by shift bring more alcohol, and it’s all _Do you remember when the Sheriff…?_ and _How about the time the Sheriff…?_ and Derek is feeling like this is more of an Irish wake than anything else (odd, considering that he’s fairly certain Stiles is Polish).

He gives only his first name, and tells everyone he met Stiles while they were both working on the Hale campaign.

Around midnight, Scott kills the music and calls for quiet. Stiles stands up on a chair, slightly flushed, and looks around the room before starting to speak.

"If you were at the service earlier, I was supposed to give a speech then, and that clearly didn’t work out. I’ve got a few things to say now, although I don’t have anything written down, and if any of you remember what happened when I ad-libbed my valedictorian speech at high school graduation, you know you’re in for a treat.” There’s a smattering of laughter, and Derek instantly resolves to find and watch a recording of that speech. Stiles shifts his weight, takes a deep breath. “My dad was the best man I’ve had the privilege of knowing. He was strong, compassionate, brilliant with a shotgun, absolute shit at Call of Duty. He was brave, dedicated, could only cook three meals, and never let a day go by without telling me that he was proud of me.” Stiles stumbles a little over the last part, and Derek’s heart clenches. Scott, standing next to Stiles’ chair, butts his forehead gently against Stiles’ hip. Stiles smiles a sad little smile down at him and rests his free hand on his friend’s head. “It’s never easy to lose someone, especially when it’s in the line of duty and you don’t get a chance to say goodbye. My dad was a father, friend, and leader to everyone in this community, not just me. So tonight, we all say goodbye by raising a glass to Sheriff John Stilinski, who at this moment is sitting in an armchair next to my mom, eating a ribeye and saying ‘I told Stiles that my cholesterol wouldn’t be what got me in the end.’ To the Sheriff.”

"To the Sheriff,” Derek echoes along with everyone else in the room.

“All right, folks, that’s enough of that,” Stiles calls over the low-level din that ensues following the toast. “The celebration of my dad’s life continues until the booze runs out, or until you have to sober up to get to your next shift. All the rooms upstairs have beds and sleeping bags if you need a place to crash. The rookies from the fire department are your designated drivers, thank you BHFD, so find Miller, Gonzalez, or Romanov if you’re trying to get home but Lydia’s confiscated your keys.”

As Stiles steps down off the chair, he catches Derek’s eye and jerks his head toward the back porch. Derek weaves his way through the crowd, catching the door as it bangs against its moorings from Stiles’ exit, and is two steps out onto the porch when something catches him hard across the jaw.

Derek half-spins, stumbling and catching himself against the railing. When his eyes stop watering, he blinks up at Stiles, who’s bouncing from foot to foot and shaking out his hand, swearing under his breath.

“Son of a bitch, goddamnit, ow, fucking _ow_.”

“Stiles,” Derek says, starting to step toward him, but Stiles comes at him again with his fist raised. Derek dodges easily, old reflexes from downtime training and boxing matches on the Air Force base coming back to him, letting Stiles’ momentum carry him right on past. They repeat this sequence of events a couple times, until Stiles collapses into the porch swings, settles his head into his hands, and lets out a huge, shuddering breath.

“Stiles, I…” Derek gropes for something to say. He had a cross-country flight to think about this, damnit, he should have been able to come up with something heartfelt and meaningful.

“What are you doing here, Derek?” Stiles drops his hands to between his knees and looks up at him, and Derek’s heart gives a weird little wheezing clench because Stiles isn’t supposed to look like that. He looks raw and open and lost, and the only thing Derek wants to do is cross the porch and sit next to him and hold him until all of this goes away, but that’s the one thing that Derek’s not allowed to do. Not anymore. He lost that privilege.

“I…I saw your dad’s obituary. And the notice about the service.”

“Okay, but what are you _doing_ here?”

“I’m…I’m so sorry about your loss,” Derek says, rubbing his jaw.

Stiles lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and sob, pushing himself up from the swing. “I didn’t invite you. I didn’t invite you to Stanford graduation, and I sure as hell did not invite you here. You don’t get to just show up in my life whenever you feel like it, that’s not fair to me, and – and – if I wanted  - a Hale here, I’d have – brought Laura – at least she _asked_ , at least – she _cares._ ”

Stiles drops back toward the swing, missing it and hitting the floor instead, his breath coming in shallow little gasps, his face red, his entire body shaking. Derek skids toward him, falling to his knees, fear rising in his brain. He’s seen PTSD-induced panic attacks before, he’s helped his guys work through them – is that what’s going on?

“Stiles, can you hear me?”

“Get – Scott.”

“Stiles, you’re going to be okay, you’re safe, just breathe.”

“GET. SCOTT.”

Worried about leaving Stiles alone but more worried about what’ll happen if he doesn’t, Derek throws open the door to the house and looks around. He’s taller than a lot of the people here, and it doesn’t take long to spot the back of Lydia’s strawberry-blonde head – and yes, thankfully, she’s still standing with Scott. Derek moves through the crowd as quickly as he can without drawing too much attention and grabs Scott by the upper arm.

“Hey, man, you need a ride home?” Scott says, laughing, probably at Derek’s wide eyes and urgency.

“Stiles needs you,” Derek blurts, saying the first thing that comes to mind, and those are apparently the magic words because Scott’s entire face shifts to concern and then he’s following Derek back to the porch.

“Stiles? Stiles, are you – oh, hey,” Scott says, pushing around Derek and settling himself next to Stiles, who’s still hunched in a ball and wheezing. His neck is turning a funny shade of reddish-blue. Derek watches from the doorway, which he carefully shuts behind him, as Scott helps Stiles lie down on his back. He situates Stiles’ head in his lap, then takes Stiles’ hands and places one over Stiles’ heart and one over his own.

“Okay, buddy, we’re just going to breathe, okay? Focus on our hands moving. Try to match your chest to mine,” Scott says, and Derek finds him subconsciously breathing in time with Scott, trying to will Stiles to do the same. “That’s it. You’re doing awesome. I’m here, Lydia’s here, you’re safe. Breathe. You’re going to be fine.”

It takes far too long for Derek’s liking, but soon Stiles is breathing evenly and Scott lets him take his hands back. “Stay down,” Scott says firmly, carefully moving Stiles to a sitting position. “I’m going to get you some water. You,” Scott says, looking at Derek as he walks back into the house. “Stay with him until I get back.”

Derek nods dumbly, still staring at Stiles’ chest and watching it move in even rhythm. When the door shuts behind Scott, it’s quiet on the porch again.

“That wasn’t about you,” Stiles says, his voice cracking more than once.

“I know.”

Scott is back too soon and not soon enough, shoving a bottle of water into Stiles’ hands. Stiles accepts it, staggers to his feet, and takes the few steps off the porch into the grass, mumbling that he’s going to walk it off.

"Five minutes, then I’m sending Miller to bring you back,” Scott calls after him. Stiles waves acknowledgement over his head.

Scott and Derek are both silent for a little bit, watching Stiles wander the far periphery of the yard.

“Thanks for coming to get me and not making a scene,” Scott says. “He doesn’t – he doesn’t like a lot of people to know.”

“Does this happen often?” Derek asks, thinking back through the months on the campaign trail. Stiles could be a pretty nervous guy, but Derek had never seen anything even remotely close to this from him.

“Not so much anymore. They started after his mom died. There were a couple rough months, but he’s got it pretty much under control these days. This is his first one since last November. He’s going to be pissed – his record’s 312 days, and he thought he was going to beat it this time.”

“His mom died?”

“Car accident. We were two months into freshman year.”

Derek feels like he’s been punched in the stomach, not the jaw. He hadn’t known about Stiles’ mom – he knew she was out of the picture, but it wasn’t something they’d ever talked about. He hadn’t known about Stiles’ panic attacks. November of last year – Election Day? He has so, so many questions for Scott, but only one comes out.

“Is he going to be okay?”

Scott smiles a little, watching Stiles reach up to tug on a few leaves. “Stiles doesn’t really believe in ‘okay.’ He’ll be awful until he’s not anymore, and then he’ll move on and start kicking ass and running your mom’s press room again.”

Derek looks at him in surprise. “Oh. I didn’t realize you knew who I was.”

“You’re Derek Hale, of course I know who are you. I’m Stiles’ best friend, and he was on your mom’s campaign team for nearly ten months, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Derek says, a bad taste starting to clot on his tongue. This is Stiles’ best friend – he could know _everything_. “I just – look, I don’t know what he’s told you about me --.”

“What he’s told me?” Scott looks up at him quizzically. “That you were a bookworm who didn’t leave his room that often?”

“That – that’s what he said?”

“What else would he have said, dude? Sorry, _Sir_ Dude. He said you didn’t really interact.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you didn't see the Kate Argent card coming, dishonor. Dishonor on your whole family. Dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow...
> 
> As always, I'm 100% in love with all you and eternally grateful for your comments/kudos/love! We're halfway done and the draft...just...keeps...getting...longer. 
> 
> Chapter title is lyric from Don't Carry It All by The Decemberists.


	6. well, i can't sleep (and i'm not in love)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He’s not drunk, he just hasn’t slept properly in two months,” Lydia says, craning her neck around for a quick kiss. Jackson rolls his eyes at Stiles and returns to the living room, where Scott is cheering about something.
> 
> “I sleep!” Stiles protests. He picks up his dropped icing bag and uses it to pipe frosting directly onto his tongue.
> 
> “Wash that immediately,” Lydia says with distaste. “And no, you don’t. I’ve found you asleep at your desk in the morning three times in the past week. That’s not sleeping, that’s passing out.”

**December, Year Three of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“I just can’t believe he really likes her, you know?” Stiles says, jabbing too hard with an icing bag and streaking the present-shaped cookie with a violent shade of orange.

“Watch it, Stiles, this is my aunt we’re talking about,” Allison cautions with mock severity, holding up a perfectly decorated gingerbread man for Lydia’s approval. Normally, Stiles is against bringing the group’s significant others in on S&A dealings, but Kate had actually been the one to tell Allison.

“Ignore him, dear, it’s just the jealousy talking,” Lydia smirks, accepting Allison’s offering and adding to the plate of final products that pass inspection. “Stiles, if you’re going to keep ruining cookies, you should really just go watch football with the other menfolk.”

“That’s sexist and hateful,” Stiles says, dropping his icing bag. “And I’m not jealous. What would I be jealous of? That Derek found the fake love of his fake life to fake marry?”

“The marriage itself will be real,” Kira points out. “It's just the rest of it that’s a sham.”

Besides, it’s Christmas Day, and everyone’s gathered at Lydia’s to enjoy the holiday. Leniency for all, and for all a good night.

“It’s Christmas,” he declares, echoing his thoughts. “You have to be nice to me on Christmas.”

“Jesus, Stilinski, how much had you had to drink?” Jackson asks, coming in from the living room and leaning around Lydia to grab another beer from the fridge. Jackson knows too, mainly because (a) he’s too intimidated by Lydia to spill to anyone they don’t want him talking to and (b) the only way Stiles can get Lydia to do what he wants if they’ve got differing opinions is by throwing some pretty heavy punches, and he hates doing that. Besides, they use Jackson’s status and connections as an Assistant District Attorney so frequently that he’s a de facto member of the team at this point.

"He’s not drunk, he just hasn’t slept properly in two months,” Lydia says, craning her neck around for a quick kiss. Jackson rolls his eyes at Stiles and returns to the living room, where Scott is cheering about something.

“I sleep!” Stiles protests. He picks up his dropped icing bag and uses it to pipe frosting directly onto his tongue.

“Wash that immediately,” Lydia says with distaste. “And no, you don’t. I’ve found you asleep at your desk in the morning three times in the past week. That’s not sleeping, that’s passing out.”

“I’ve been busy,” Stiles grumbles, standing up and moving to the sink. Yeah, busy. He washes the little silver nib thing from the bag, then picks up one of the dirty mixing bowls. Busy setting up dates for Derek Hale and the delightful Kate Argent. Busy writing press releases about the burgeoning love between Derek Hale and the enchanting Kate Argent. Busy leaking the news that Derek Hale and the luminous Kate Argent will be looking at engagement rings at Thatcher Jewels this Wednesday afternoon. Busy trying not to jam a letter opener into his eye every time he gets a message about Derek Hale or the effervescent Kate fucking Argent.

Lydia’s hand closes over his soapy wrist, startling him. “Stiles.”

"What?” Stiles says crossly, tugging free and reaching for the next dish. His hand clasps on empty air.

“Stiles,” Lydia repeats, her voice gentler this time.

Stiles tears his eyes away from the sink and looks up at around. Every dish and utensil is clean – he’s washed them all. Two plates of elaborately decorated cookies sit on the counter, the rejects already in bags for the rest of them to take home at the end of the night. Stiles and Lydia are the only two left in the kitchen.

He sighs. “How long?”

“Forty-five minutes, give or take,” she says. “I didn’t notice you were checked out until Kira pointed out that you were scrubbing the sink. I just finished up and kept giving you things to wash until we ran out.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, forcing his fingers to unclench and drop the sponge. “Can I – Scott?”

“Yeah, sweetie, I’ll get him,” she says, pressing a kiss to his cheek and whisking out of the room.

Scott’s there in a flash, leaning up against the counter next to him in a pose of studied calm. “Hey, buddy. You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I just -.” Stiles reaches a hand out semi-blindly. Scott immediately takes it and flattens Stiles’ palm against his chest, disregarding the soap suds transferring onto his shirt. He offers Stiles his other hand in return, but Stiles shakes his head, drilling down to focus on the steady rhythm of Scott’s chest rising and falling, the reassuring double thud of his heart. “I’m okay. It’s not…not a full one. Just lost it there for a minute.”

“Does it count as killing your record if it’s not a full one?” Scott asks, and Stiles’ resultant laugh acts like a mini AED shock. His heart resumes firing on all cylinders, his breathing levels out to parallel Scott’s. He squeezes Scott’s shoulder in thanks, then searches for a dishtowel to wipe his hands.

“Lydia told everyone you were just really deep in thought about something,” Scott says after a minute. Stiles can feel Scott’s eyes following him, tracking his every move. It’ll be a few days before he lets up on the monitoring. “We’ve all seen you when you get focused on whiteboarding at work, so I think Kira and Jackson bought it. Allison’ll believe what I tell her. Isaac knows.”

“He usually does.”

“Yeah.” Scott hops up to sit on the counter, filching one of the cookies and ruining Lydia’s plating. “Want to tell me what happened?”

“Would you drop it if I asked you to?”

“Yes, because it’s Christmas and you don’t make people talk about things they don’t want to talk about on Christmas. But I’ll ask again tomorrow.”

“And if I don’t want to talk about it tomorrow?” Stiles stretches across the counter and takes a cookie, too. Let Lydia rain hell if she wants to.

Scott quietly drums his heels against the cabinet. “You know that you don’t owe him silence, right? After everything he’s said and done, after everything _you_ did to protect him. You don’t owe him anything.”

“I wasn’t protecting _him_. I was protecting the president. And the republic.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“And I haven’t been silent. I told you everything that’s happened, from the day I met him in San Francisco until he found me at that damn bar in April.”

“You tell me facts. Like you’re giving me a case rundown. I’m your best friend, Stiles, I can tell that there’s a lot more going on than you’re talking about and that it’s eating you alive. I want to believe that you’ll talk to me when you’re ready and when you need it, but damnit, Stiles, things like _this_ \--,” he gestures expansively at the empty sink and the mountain of drying dishes, “—are just going to keep happening.”

“I am _fine_ , Scott.”

“You’re not fine,” Lydia says from the doorway, her arms crossed in front of her, one hip jutted out, and this is exactly how Stiles remembers her from the first day they met at Mock Trial – fierce, beautiful, frighteningly intelligent. She crosses to the counter and leans her elbows against the granite. “You’re not even in the neighborhood of _fine_ , and I should know, because I built my entire life around being _fine_ until you showed up and cared enough to set that life on fire and force me to fight my way to a better place.”

“She’s right,” Scott says. “You rescued all of us by giving us what we needed to fight our demons. You sat each of us down and said that you could help, that we could get our lives back, and that all you asked in return was total honesty. Why doesn’t that rule apply to you?”

"Because it’s my name on the door,” Stiles says bluntly. He _hates_ doing this, pulling rank – has only done in twice in the almost two years S &A has been up and running. But at least he’s used it honorably in the past; this time just makes him feel like a coward.

Lydia and Scott apparently feel the same, because Lydia just glares at him, and Scott, without raising his eyes from the half-eaten cookie he’s slowly crumbling to dust and smeared icing, says, “That’s not good enough anymore.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, Stiles,” Scott says, swinging himself off the counter. “That’s not a valid reason anymore. What happens if your next panic attack hits in public? Or when I’m not around?”

“I’m not going to--.”

“Or,” Scott continues, cutting him off, “What happens when you start getting tension headaches—.”

“Scott,” Lydia warns.

“—tension headaches, like your mom started getting a few weeks before--.”

“Scott!”

Fine!” Scott thunders. He draws a deep breath. “Fine. I’m sorry.”

Stiles nods, numb, standing between the two people he knows best in all the world, feeling like an outsider.

“We’re family,” Scott says into the oppressive quiet. “The five of us. We’re all any of us have left anymore. We can’t afford to lose each other.”

 

***

 

The last week of December is probably the quietest week S&A has all year. The Hill is mostly abandoned, down to a skeleton crew since everyone’s home with their families. The holidays tend to make politicians strangely well-behaved, like they’re worried a real-life Santa is going to come snatch away their re-election hopes if they deign to tarnish the magic of the season.

The team starts the week in their individual offices, but gravitate into the conference room by Thursday afternoon. It’s quiet, everyone wrapped up in their own projects, but every so often Kira and Isaac check each other’s work on some back-door coding thing they’re make progress on. Lydia bounces ideas for handling the Riemann account off Scott and Stiles; Stiles whiteboards a strategy for the upcoming Waterbach senatorial campaign, which he’s still not sure if he’s going to take. Isaac brings in a tray of something he calls a casserole on Friday and looks like he’s attempting to fold into himself when they all gamely try it, and it’s surprisingly not the worst thing Stiles has eaten that week.

“Allison helped me,” Isaac says in the half-whisper voice he uses when he’s not sure if what he’s doing is okay, when he’s partially expecting someone to punish him.

“It’s great, Isaac, thank you,” Stiles says earnestly, picking out another piece of what could be broccoli or spinach or zucchini or something else green. He raises an eyebrow at Scott behind Isaac’s back and mouths, _Allison_?

Scott shrugs and mouths back, _Family_.

           

***

 

Stiles spends New Year’s Eve alone (“Which only sounds pathetic when you say it like _that_ , Scott.”).

It’s how he prefers to ring in the New Year, actually. He’s never really been a fan of the club scene, and though his connections got him the requisite invitations to several swanky parties, going to these things is only stomach-able when he’s on business and/or has a date. He’s actually caught up on S&A’s caseload for once – probably courtesy of the stress-induced insomnia Lydia had so kindly pointed out at Christmas – and the idea of trying to find someone to go to a New Year’s party with him this late in the game just seems tragically desperate.

So, instead of wearing uncomfortable shoes and making small talk with people who lie like it’s going out of style, he’s at home in his pajamas, alternating beer and whiskey (which is incredibly stupid and he’s going to have the hangover from hell tomorrow, because 28-year-old Stiles doesn’t bounce back with nearly the elasticity of his previous incarnations), watching the Mighty Ducks trilogy and counting down the minutes to midnight.

And it’s fine that he’s drinking. As a rule, he doesn’t get drunk in public anymore – bad for the firm’s image – but he’s safely locked in his apartment and he doesn’t own a car to drive drunk. And he’s taking advantage of his own lowered inhibitions to have a serious talk with himself about the Derek thing.

It had taken him months to pull himself back together. Sure, he’d only granted himself three days of actual, literal, movie-style moping – aided and abetted by roommate-of-the-century Scott, who had provided a constant source of curly fries, ice cream, and self-esteem. He’d gotten back to Palo Alto on a Thursday and was on his feet again by Monday morning, but it had taken weeks for him to start tentatively chipping away at the giant cinderblock wall he’d constructed in his mind, and it had taken _months_ for him to actually feel any semblance of normal. It didn’t help that he couldn’t tell anyone the actual truth about everything. He told Scott and his dad that the guy who’d broken his heart was Terrance from the Hale campaign’s Communications team, and that Stiles found out on Election Day that Terrance had a wife (that part was true, at least; Terrance did have a wife, and Stiles only found out she existed on Election Day. That guy was a few different kinds of shady.).

It’s wasn’t that he didn’t trust Dad and Scott to keep the truth to themselves, it was just that every time he tried to come up with the words for what he was feeling, he failed. And Stiles wasn’t used to failing to find the words he needed. He’d starting speaking in full (albeit run-on) sentences at the age of two and never looked back, but it seemed that trapping his catastrophic emotions on the other side of his mental wall had trapped all the words related to them, too.

Now, though, Stiles finally has the words. It’s taken him four years, but he thinks he understands why he fell apart so spectacularly, when he’d never been the type to break down over a guy or girl before. Yeah, he’d been in love with Derek and Derek had hurt him, but he hadn’t even known the guy six months before Election Day. No, Stiles understands now how much else Derek had triggered, and Stiles knows that it takes a lot more than one night of cruel, shouted words to break a Stilinski man’s heart forever (Mom dumped Dad three times, in fact. Including once a week before their wedding.) And if Stiles were a little _more_ drunk, he’d probably get his phone and call Derek and tell him all of those things right now.

But Stiles is only moderately drunk. So he settles further into the ostentatious but unarguably comfortable armchair Lydia had bought him as an apartment-warming gift, starts the second movie, and falls asleep by 11pm.

 

**March, Year Two of Talia Hale’s First Term (1.75 years ago)**

Derek’s starting to hate visiting DC. Luke and Chen have settled into a laid-back routine in Boston, apparently having come to the conclusion that there’s no imminent threat to the First Son’s life after fourteen months when the most remotely threatening incident was Derek startling a German Shepard while out on a run last autumn. They’re actually starting to become – well, not friends, per say, but friendly. And they agreed to move into the apartment across the hall instead of actually _living_ with Derek, so he has a roommate (Greg, another business school student who makes awesome burgers and happily agreed to free rent in exchange for a thoroughly invasive background check) and something approximating a normal life.

In DC, however, Luke and Chen flip back to Super Agent mode. And since Derek is here for an entire week, attending the four galas, two “family” parties, and one _actual_ family party in honor of his mother’s 50th birthday, it’s driving Derek absolutely nuts, so he suggests a visit to Fox & Hole.

Fox & Hole is a boxing gym right in the heart of downtown DC, and almost no one knows it exists – or, rather, everyone _knows_ it exists, but no one knows where it is or who’s a member. Or everyone sort of _knows_ who’s a member, but can’t prove it. It’s like Harvard’s secret societies.

Not that Derek knows about Harvard’s secret societies. Definitely, definitely not.

Fox & Hole’s membership is 90% former military personnel-turned-politician-or-businessman, which is how Derek gets brought into the fold. Daniel, Derek’s Air Force co-captain, was something of a family legacy at Fox & Hole, and had introduced Derek to the right people when he and his wife took a vacation on the east coast last spring. Since then, Derek’s been using the gym as a sanctuary from DC madness whenever he’s in town – no one here particularly cares that he’s the president’s son or heir apparent to Hale Enterprises. They only care about his record in the ring. Luke, in one of those rare moments of openness back in Boston, had made a comment once about how Fox & Hole was basically just a Fight Club for the elite.

 _I am Joe’s smirking revenge_.

It had made Derek’s stomach twist.

The other 10% of Fox & Hole’s members are off-duty Secret Service and other protective detail, actual boxing instructors, a handful of men grandfathered in, and an even smaller handful of unaffiliated civilians who made the right friend or were owed the right favor.

That last group has got to be why Derek sees none other than Stiles Stilinski in the ring in the back corner today, midway through a spar.

Derek leans against one of the support beams, watching. The last time he’d seen Stiles was at Sheriff Stilinski’s funeral, when Stiles had thrown a punch at him that had landed more of an emotional than a mental blow – doesn’t look like that’d be the case anymore, though. He works in quick, economical motions, little jabs and darts, using his speed to his advantage against his larger opponent, whom Derek thinks is the Secretary of State’s son.

The bout doesn’t last much longer, Stiles’ opponent heading out citing a meeting on the Hill, and Derek approaches cautiously. Luke and Chen, on duty today instead of getting into matches of their own, follow.

“Hey.”

“…hey,” Stiles responds, spitting his mouthguard out. “Didn’t know you came here.”

"Yeah, whenever I’m in town.” Derek looks at his feet, at the ring, at the fluorescent lights, basically anywhere to avoid looking at Stiles and the way his hair is plastered to his forehead and the back of his neck with sweat.

“Your mom’s birthday?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. Look, do you want to…” Stiles starts, looking like he has no idea how he’s going to end that sentence, casting his eyes around the room and settling on a punch mitt. “…block?”

Okay, not where Derek thought that was going. But sure, climbing in the ring with a guy who openly despises him? Great idea.

Derek ducks into the ring and takes up a punch mitt in his right hand and a shield in his left. Stiles starts slowly, easy jabs and basic kicks, and this is…well, it’s certainly not comfortable. But these are motions that Derek knows, that his muscles easily fall back into, and Stiles isn’t yelling at him or having a panic attack or looking at him like Derek personally skins puppies and leaves them outside Stiles’ door every morning, so it’s a step in the right direction.

“I, uh…” Derek fumbles, once they’re both a little more loose, a little more into each other’s patterns. “I heard that you left the White House. Resigned as my mom’s Press Secretary.”

Stiles throws a series of hooks and crosses that Derek can barely keep up with. “That was four news cycles ago. It’s over, it’s done.”

“What happened?”

Stiles jabs; Derek blocks. “Turns out, I’m not so good at taking direct orders without asking questions.”

“Want to talk about it?”

Stiles abruptly pulls up out of his stance and looks at him with such disgust that Derek actually takes a step back. “You know what? This was a bad idea.”

“Why is this a bad idea?” Derek asks, following him to the edge of the ring and trying not to notice that Stiles has pretty much sweated through his white t-shirt, bringing the dark lines of the tattoo on his right shoulderblade into relief.

Stiles rips tape from his wrist with his teeth. “Being around each other is a bad idea. Us talking is a bad idea. Us sparring is a really, really bad fucking idea.”

“Why? We’re friends,” Derek says without thinking about the words coming out of his mouth.

“Oh, we are so not _friends_!” Stiles shouts, whirling on Derek and shoving him hard in the chest. He seems to immediately realize what he’s done and is three steps away, hands above his head, by the time Luke has his firearm aimed at Stiles’ chest.

“It’s okay,” Derek pants, rubbing where Stiles hit him. “It’s okay, I’m okay, stand down. In fact, could you just wait outside?”

“He should stay!” Stiles says before Luke can respond. He lowers his voice to a hiss so it won’t carry. “After all, they were right outside the door when we were screwing in any room that locked on the campaign trail.”

Stiles lashes out, wrists not braced, and Derek blocks on reflex. “Stiles, you can’t fight without your wrists taped. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Shut up,” Stiles grits, throwing another combo. Derek walks in a steady circle backwards, blocking as gently as he can, pulling back the second he feels contact. “Just shut up. You don’t get to care about me hurting myself. You don’t get to care about me at all, not anymore.”

They don’t talk for the next several minutes. Stiles keeps attacking, Derek keeps blocking, unable to stem the anger bubbling up in his chest until he’s swiping back at Stiles, landing a few solid blows with the mitt. They finally break apart, both panting, when Derek bulls Stiles into the ropes with the shield and immediately pulls away.

“God, Stiles, what do you _want_ from me?” Derek demands, chucking the shield to the floor and ripping the mitt off. “I’ve apologized. I’ve apologized a million times, in every way I know how, in every way you’ll _let_ me. How can we make this better if you won’t talk to me?”

Stiles spits over the side of the ring, and God help him but Derek finds that way more attractive than he should. “What have I done to give you the impression that I’m _interested_ in making it better?”

Derek doesn’t have an answer for that.

Stiles’ phone rings, and he jogs over to answer it. “Lydia,” Stiles says, pulling up his shirt to mop sweat off his face and showing that boxing has been good to _all_ parts of his body. “What’s going on? Okay, is – yeah, I can be there in an hour. Have Isaac get started.”

Stiles ends the call, ducks under the ropes, and takes two steps toward the locker room before looking back. “Derek. Chen. Luke,” he says, nodding at each of them in turn. “Always such a _pleasant_ surprise.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU MAKE MY HEART SOAR. Seriously. SO much love. Love that drives me to post TWO chapters tonight! Chapter 7 will be up momentarily!
> 
> Also, the next chapter is superridiculouslylong, so forgive this one being a tiny bit shorter than usual? 
> 
> Chapter title is a lyric from Speak by Nickel Creek.


	7. i guess we were wondering if this was our answer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Peppermint green tea,” Lydia says, cradling her own mug and breathing in the steam. “Perfect for snowy winter days. And for when we don’t need you jittering around the State of the Union hopped up on caffeine.”
> 
> “I don’t jitter at all when I’m being dressed by the White House fashion police,” Stiles scowls.
> 
> “Poor Stiles, has to wear an Armani suit and be Laura’s date to the biggest speech of the year,” Scott says with a grin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YO if you didn't get the memo, this is the second chapter I've posted tonight! Go back and read 6 if you jumped directly to here :)

**January, Fourth Year of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“Does this mean the case is closed?” Kira asks, sending screenshots of the all the blog posts and news sites proclaiming that Derek Hale and Kate Argent got engaged at the Argent family home in Aspen on January 14 to the wall monitor.

“We’re contracted to get Derek a wife, not a fiancé,” Stiles says, taking a cautious sip from his mug. “The case is open until she says ‘I do’ and the ink on the marriage license dries. Hey, this is pretty good, Lyds, what it is?”

“Peppermint green tea,” Lydia says, cradling her own mug and breathing in the steam. “Perfect for snowy winter days. And for when we don’t need you jittering around the State of the Union hopped up on caffeine.”

“I don’t jitter at all when I’m being dressed by the White House fashion police,” Stiles scowls.

“Poor Stiles, has to wear an Armani suit and be Laura’s date to the biggest speech of the year,” Scott says with a grin.

“While the rest of us watch from Scott and Allison’s and play that game where you drink every time they interrupt the president by clapping, right?” Isaac asks, looking to Stiles for confirmation.

“Right,” Stiles nods.

“Do I have to?”

“Social cues.”

Isaac thinks about this, then sits back, having apparently accepted the inevitability of semi-forced team bonding.

“Stiles isn’t her date, Scott,” Lydia says, brushing right past the moment. “You don’t take a date to the State of the Union. He’s just her plus-one.”

“Derek and Kate will be there too, and Cora and her husband,” Kira says, eyes sparkling. “President Hale and the First Gentleman will lead all of you down the that carpet outside. They’ve been showing the setup for hours on CNN. It’s like a movie premiere!”

“Never lose that small town innocence, sweetheart,” Lydia says.

“As much fun as this is, I should get going,” Stiles says, draining the rest of his tea and standing up. “I’m supposed to meet Laura at the Residence at 4:30.”

On cue, Boyd sticks his head around the doorframe. “Ready to go, Mr. Stilinski?”

 

***

 

The noise of the crowd is deafening as soon as the car door opens. Stiles climbs out as gracefully as he can and offers Laura a hand up, smiling at some of the familiar faces inside the press line, waving at the thousands of public chanting for Talia, against Talia, about certain issues.

They walk a short distance to where their little processional is gathering. They’ll follow the president and Mr. Hale, and Derek and Kate, then Cora and Sean will follow – but when Derek gets out of his car, Kate’s not the one who follows him out; it’s Maddie, Stiles’ once-assistant and now the White House Press Secretary.

“What’s Maddie doing here?” Stiles shouts into Laura’s ear as Maddie and Derek draw closer. Behind them, Cora and Sean are arriving.

“Kate couldn’t make it at the last minute,” Laura calls back. “She got called into the hospital for a patient.”

Cora and Sean in place, they all start moving toward the Capitol. Stiles doesn’t really understand why he, Derek, Sean, and David Hale were all given little earpieces with access to the Secret Service’s secure line, but he enjoys hearing the snippets of conversation tracking their progress, trying to identify whose voice is whose. He’s got Erica picked out, obviously, and thinks he might be able to tell the difference between Luke and Boyd –

The first three shots are fired before Stiles even hears a scream, and then his senses start only picking up flickers of what’s going on. The voices shouting in his ear, Laura’s hand yanked out of his, the high pitched whistle- _crack_ of another shot, the bone-shaking explosion behind him as a gas tank goes up that knocks him to his knees and the sharp pain of concrete against kneecap that starts his brain functioning again.

His first thought is, _I’m alive_.

His second thought is, _The president._

He jams his finger against his ear, trying to make sense of the high-speed jabber through Secret Service channel. He looks around for Laura, looks around for anyone –

Another shot.

He finds Laura, grabs her face between his hands. His heart is beating so loudly that he has to shout to be heard over it - “Are you hurt?”

She shakes her head, tears streaking mascara down her face. Boyd finds them then, folding Laura in his arms, speaking into his mic and Stiles hears the words echoed in his earpiece: “ _Moneypenny secured_.” He grabs Stiles’ arm and pulls, but Stiles wrenches free.

“Where’s the president?” Stiles shouts. “Is she safe?”

Boyd, without a split second’s hesitation, lifts Laura bodily off the ground and runs with her towards a car. He sees Derek’s anxious face inside, sees Maddie looking pale beside him, and a voice through his earpiece says, “ _Moondance and Marlin away. Status on Magician?”_

The nicknames, Stiles thinks, the stupid stupid nicknames.

Two more shots. Stiles stumbles a few steps forward, crouches behind a trashcan that he thinks shields him from the direction of the shots, desperately flipping through his brain for knowledge of which First Family member matches which codename. Stiles should _know_ this, he was in the freaking meeting when they got their protection assigned because the names always leak to the press – Moondance. Moondance is the president, Marlin is Mr. Hale. Derek and Maddie were in the car. They’re away, they’re safe, and that just leaves –

Magician. _Cora_.

Silence crackles against his eardrum. There’s another shot. There’s a body on the ground near Stiles, but it’s not in a blue dress so it’s not Cora.

“CORA!” He shouts, praying for an answer, praying he’ll be heard above the screaming and the sirens.

“ _Status on Magician?”_ The voice in his ear demands again, and there’s still no response.

“CORA!” Stiles shouts a second time, and suddenly she’s there, throwing herself into his arms, sobbing against his neck.

“Oh thank God,” Stiles breathes, hugging her tight against him. “Cora, where’s Sean?”

“S-s-safe,” she cries, “Went – with – Chen – I – the – crowd – couldn’t –.”

There’s another shot, and from the sharp clanging that resounds through his ribcage, it must have hit the trashcan they’re hiding behind. “Okay,” Stiles says. “Okay, I’ve got to get you out of here.”

He can do this. He can _do_ this. He’s seen every action movie in the history of the world. He’s been in more security and emergency procedure meetings than he can count. He is not panicking, because Cora _is_ panicking, and they can’t both panic or they’ll both die. See? It’s simple logic. This is just another problem to solve, and Stiles is an excellent problem-solver.

“We’re too far from the cars, and the shooting’s coming from that direction anyway, but we’re, like, 25 yards from the Capitol, Cora. Cora. Cora, Cora.” She doesn’t respond right away, and he pulls her face away from shoulder and looks her straight in the eye, pressing their foreheads together. “Are you with me? Breathe.”

Stiles is _not_ panicking, because Cora is panicking, they can’t both panic or they’ll both die. Simple logic.

Cora takes a few shuddering breaths at his command, and Stiles can feel her heartbeat slowing from where his hand is steady on her neck. She rips her heels off her feet and looks back at him, swallowing hard. “Ready.”

“ _Status on Magician_?”

“We go after two more shots,” he says, turning Cora in his lap so they’re both facing the Capitol. The main door is still open, the entrance abandoned. “I’m going to push you and you _run_. Shots will be coming from behind us, so you stay in front of me and _run_ , Cora, don’t look back even for a second. Turn right as soon as you clear the door.”

A shot cracks off something to their left. Stiles is horribly, horribly aware that the space is now pretty much deserted, save the bodies – they’re going to be the only thing moving. The only targets.

“We go on the next shot,” he says. “What do you do?”

“Run. Stay in front. Don’t look back. Turn right.”

“Good.” He doesn’t ask if she’s ready again. She has to be ready.

The next few seconds are the longest in Stiles’ life.

Stiles. Is. Not. Panicking.

The shot impacts a tree, and Stiles plants his hand on the small of Cora’s back and _heaves_. Then he’s up, following her, matching his stride to hers so he’s directly behind her, directly shadowing her, and they’re running and running and Stiles hears the next shot and running and the next shot and running and he mimics Cora in grabbing the doorframe with his right hand, letting his momentum swing him around and into the Capitol out of the line of fire, and Cora’s there being hugged by someone he doesn’t recognize and he collapses to the floor, breathing heavily, already feeling the blood spread out against the back of his jacket. He struggles to get his cell phone out of his pocket, his right arm not cooperating.

“St-Stiles?” Cora asks, her voice tinny and far away. “What are you doing?”         

Stiles ignores her and focuses very hard on hitting the right keys. He’s reasonably certain he manages to send Derek a text that reads _Magician secure_ before the pain catches up with him and he goes into shock.

 

***

 

Stiles comes to in little bits and pieces. The noise of a piece of paper being crumpled. A bright light against his pupil. The tacky, bright copper taste of blood in his mouth. A hand in his. The smell of antiseptic. It’s like his senses are rebooting, coming online one by one.

He tries to make the Mac start-up noise when he can finally get his eyes to open and completely fails, choking on his tongue and startling everyone around him – and fuck, there are a lot of them – into movement. A nurse scurries off for ice chips, another nurse pins his right arm to his side, Scott pins his left arm, maybe another nurse puts a hand on his forehead and pushes him firmly back down onto a pillow.

A pillow, in a hospital bed, in a hospital. Because…because he got shot. _And that’s memory, now functional._

“Mr. Stilinski,” says the nurse with the hand on Stiles’ forehead. “Mr. Stilinski, please calm down. Do you know where you are?”

Stiles tries to answer but chokes on his tongue again, only it’s not his tongue at all.

“There’s a tube in your throat that was helping you breathe, Mr. Stilinski. I’m going to pull it out now, and I need you to cough when I say so. Do you understand, Mr. Stilinski? Blink once for yes.”

Stiles blinks, the motion taking more effort than he remembers. He wonders if nurses get paid extra for each time they use a patient’s name.

“Okay. I’m going to count to three. You cough on three and stick your tongue out, okay, Mr. Stilinski? Blink once for yes.”

Stiles blinks.

“Great. One, two, three.”

Stiles has had his fair share of weird physical feelings. Someone trying to suction his organs out through his mouth is new, though. He coughs, he gags, he makes a truly offensive retching sound, and Scott’s still there when the tube comes out, holding his hand and smiling that blinding Scott smile, and this moment is how Stiles knows Scott loves him.

“Welcome back, buddy,” Scott says.

 "Yes, welcome back, Mr. Stilinski,” says the tube-puller. He grabs the ice chips the first nurse comes back with and hands them to Scott. “We’ll go get the doctor. Mr. McCall, he can have one ice chip per minute.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Scott says, mock serious, and Stiles wants to laugh but it hurts his throat and his chest and his back and he notices for the first time that his right arm is in a sling against his torso.

“Careful, dude,” Scott says, pulling a chair toward the bed with his foot and sitting down, carefully placing an ice chip on Stiles’ tongue. It’s the best thing he’s ever experienced. “You’re in rough condition. Okay, they told me it would be difficult for you to talk for awhile, you can’t use your writing arm, and the Secret Service took my cell phone when I got here and yours is being kept as evidence, so I’m just going to try to tell you everything I think you want to know and we’ll figure it out from there. Good?”

He passes Stiles another ice chip and swigs from a water bottle. Stiles is jealous, but appreciates his little flake of icy goodness.

“The entire First Family, and Sean and Maddie, are all safe,” Scott begins, and if Stiles knows Scott _loves_ him from smiling during throat-tube-removal, Stiles knows Scott _knows_ him because that’s exactly the first question Stiles would have asked. “The First Gentleman was hit in the left shin, but his surgery went well and he’s expected to make a full recovery. They’re all on lockdown now. It’s been,” Scott checks his watch, “fifty-two hours since the shooting. It’s 11PM on Thursday.”

Ice chip for Stiles, sip of water for Scott.

“No leads on the shooter yet, and no one’s claimed responsibility, but they’re calling it an assassination attempt on all the networks. After you and Cora ran for it, the shooting stopped. They found a rooftop with shell casings, but no prints or other evidence. There’s some stuff online about a group of Bahrainian extremists, but it’s all just hearsay at this point. Eight casualties: three press, three civilians, two Secret Service. No one you know. A bunch more injured. There’s a little girl in the surgical ICU, they don’t think she’s going to make it through the night.”

 Ice chip, water sip.

“The team’s all fine. Everyone was at me and Ally’s to watch, so we were all together. They showed the entire thing, Stiles – Marine Two kept rolling on the carpet while Marine One tried to find the shooter. It’s far away, but you can see the whole – you can watch you save Cora on repeat. Which is what Isaac’s been doing since it happened, even though you’re just a little black dot and she’s a blue one. They’re keeping your name out of it, I think at the president’s request – they’re just calling you an ‘unidentified hero.’”

Ice, water.

“What else,” Scott mumbles to himself. “What else, what else – oh, you. Right. Okay, like I said, pretty rough. You got hit once, the second bullet after you and Cora started running. Entered below your right shoulderblade, broke two ribs, punctured your lung, tore a couple major vessels. You tried really hard to bleed out on the floor of the Capitol, then spent seventeen hours in surgery, slept for ten hours, blew the stitches holding one of your arteries together, went back to surgery for six hours, and they put you in a medically induced coma until a little while ago. And I think that about brings us up to speed.”

“Very good, Mr. McCall,” says a voice from the doorway. “Do you have medical training?”

“Thought I was going to be a vet for awhile, but no,” Scott says, standing and holding out his hand. “Dr. Markings, good to see you again.”

“All-en,” Stiles croaks out, slightly alarmed, making a little claw hand at the ice chips and wincing at his voice. Allen Markings, in addition to being someone Stiles had dated briefly, is a neurosurgeon. “My – brain?”

“Your brain is perfectly fine, Stiles,” Allen says, taking the chair next to Scott and thumbing open Stiles’ chart on his tablet. “Well, as fine as it ever is, given that you’re _you._ I’m here as a friend, I wasn’t in your surgery. You’re coming down from some serious sedatives and anesthetics, though – how’s your pain? Not your throat, your chest.”

***

Nurses and other doctors check in on him frequently for the next few hours, adjusting the levels of his medications, talking to him about recovery timelines, making him blow air into a little tube thing with a ball in it and make the ball hover. They say they’ll release him into Scott’s care when Stiles can make the ball stay above a little red line for five straight seconds and that he should expect to be here for at _least_ a week. Stiles vows to be home by Monday. In the morning, FBI guys (or maybe NSA, possibly CIA, potentially Secret Service, could be Homeland Security) come to take his statement and Stiles finds that a lot of the details are fuzzy – did he hear that car explode before or after he found Laura? How did he know which side of the trashcan was safe? How did he know that Derek and Maddie were safe?

Scott convinces the tube-pulling nurse to let him take a shower in the staff locker room and borrow a pair of scrubs with a lot of shameless flirting and gratuitous use of dimples. He also commandeers a cot from somewhere and sets it up next to Stiles’ bed, demonstrating once again that he wields puppy-dog eyes and incorrigible charm like weapons, and they talk and nap and watch the news. Stiles watches little black-dot-Stiles and blue-dot-Cora race for the Capitol again and again. The stations are looping it because they’re not making any progress on finding the shooter.

***

Some time later, a nurse comes in with a little vial of medication and tell him it’ll help him get restful sleep through the night. Stiles nods his assent, frowning as he tries to remember something. The details he was missing earlier have been trickling back in throughout the day: The car exploded before he found Laura. That side of the trashcan was safe because the windows in the Capitol had been shot out, so the shooter had to be in the opposite direction. Derek and Maddie were safe because he saw them in the car Boyd took Laura to.

“Scott?” Stiles says, starting to feel the sedative kick in. “Why wasn’t Kate Argent at the State of the Union?”

“Patient emergency,” Scott says. “She told the investigators that she had to rush back to Inova Fairfax.”

“Check on that.”

 

  **December, Year Two of Talia Hale’s First Term (1.1 years ago)**

Stiles isn’t sure why he RSVPs to the Hale Enterprises 34th Annual Christmas Party. He’s been getting the invitations every year since the campaign and ignoring them every year since the campaign, but this year he checks the “Plus One” box and mails it in, savoring the irony that is a green energy/tech company still sending paper invitations via snail mail. It’d be depressing to attend without a date, so he calls Dr. Allen Markings – a neurosurgeon he’s been casually dating. Allen jumps at the chance to spend the weekend two weeks before Christmas in New Orleans, and although Stiles nearly backs out at least half a dozen times in the days leading up to the event, he finds himself actually excited about the night when he and Allen step out of their taxi.

“Shit,” Allen says, craning his neck, trying to see the top of the Hale Enterprises flagship building in downtown New Orleans. “And this is just one of them?”

“HaleEnt NOLA’s the smallest of the bunch, actually,” Stiles says, offering Allen his arm. “You should see the manufacturing base at HaleEnt Houston. I’ve only seen pictures, but David told me once that you could roll two Dreamliners wingtip-to-wingtip through the cafeteria and have plenty of clearance. They need a two-Dreamliner cafeteria just to feed all the people that work there.”

“I can’t believe you actually _know_ the Hales,” Allen says, allowing Stiles to lead him toward the low din coming from the end of the hall. “You told me you did, obviously, I know you worked on the campaign and in the White House, but still. You actually _know_ them.”

“ _Knew_ them,” Stiles corrects. “It’s been a couple months since I saw Laura, even. Ah…this must be the place.”

They step into a lavishly decorated open lobby, where literally hundreds of people are laughing, dancing, drinking, wearing sparkly gowns and flashy cufflinks. HaleEnt NOLA used to be a hotel, Stiles remembers – Arthur Hale bought the building back in 1982 when the company needed more space, shored up the foundation, and started construction to add another twenty floors. As a result, the building is sort of shaped like a giant donut: open space in the center of every floor, so when you’re standing in the main lobby you can look up and see the massive skylight showcasing a Harvest Moon fifty floors above.

It’s a little dizzying, but incredibly beautiful. Stiles knows that David Hale, First Gentleman and reigning CEO of HaleEnt, has people who have people who have people who have people to oversee things like decorating for a holiday party, but he definitely has the right chain of command in place – Stiles feels like he’s stepped into the pages of _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_. Clusters of real pine trees line the walls, dusted with the most realistic fake snow Stiles has ever seen. All the floors above the ground level are dark, save for the thousands and thousands of white lights winking gently from the railings leading all the way to the skylight. There’s a raised dance floor, a live twenty-piece band, tables and tables of food that smells amazing and probably tastes even better.

“Told you it’d be good,” he says into Allen’s ear. “C’mon.”

Stiles has a few issues with the Hales. The Derek thing is a given, but his relationship with Talia is still a little rocky given the nature of his resignation as White House Press Secretary. Laura had been peeved about that for a while too, although she’d understood his reasons. David smokes when he’s extremely stressed, and Cora can actually be more abrasive than the rest of them put together when she sets her mind to it. So yes, Stiles has a couple issues with the Hales, but it has to be said – they throw one _hell_ of a party.

HaleEnt employs far too many people across the country to bring them all together for this, so each of the other major locations (DC, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, and Denver) throw local parties on the same night. They do, however, select five hundred employees at random from the non-NOLA offices each year and fly them and their families in for the weekend, all-expenses paid, so Stiles and Allen spend the next few hours talking and drinking and dancing with people from all over the country. Allen turns out to be a major charmer with the under-8 set, and Stiles is watching him dance with a particularly adorable 6-year-old girl from Chicago when Laura snakes her arm through his.

“Thought I saw my favorite former colleague burning up the dance floor,” she says. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

He presses a kiss to the top of her head. “I wasn’t sure I was coming, either. Allen’s helping, though.”

Laura surveys the scene as Allen spins the little girl into a giggling fit. “He’s cute. Good with kids. Your date?”

“Yeah. He’s a _neurosurgeon_.”

She laughs. “Good – I always said you should get someone to look at your brain. _No one_ should be able to recite the entire Constitution from memory. While drunk.”

“I was a special child,” Stiles says proudly. “And that was an _awesome_ night.”

“Special indeed,” Laura agrees. “Does your boy know how special you are?”

Allen, like he can sense them talking about him, looks over and smiles broadly, still whirling his tiny dance partner in circles. He waves at them, whispers something in the little girl’s ear, and she giggles some more and scurries toward a table laden with cookies.

“We’re not that serious yet,” Stiles says as Allen makes his way over. “We could be, though. Maybe. I’m not sure. Are you here with someone?”

“Me?” Laura laughs. “You know better than that. I’m a lone wolf.”

“Hi,” Allen says, finally reaching them. “I thought you were coming back after one song?”

“My fault,” Laura says, smiling and shaking Allen’s hand. “I commandeered him. Laura Hale, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Allen Markings,” Allen says, a little dazed around the eyes. “Laura _Hale_ Hale? As in, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Hale?”

“C’mon, toots, be cool,” Stiles mocks, sliding an arm around Allen’s waist. “You knew she’d be here, you know we’re friends.”

“Don’t be hard on him, Stiles, I _am_ rather breathtaking,” Laura says. “And I like a man who knows me as the Deputy Chief of Staff, not just the president’s daughter.”

Allen mentions something about a quote from Laura he’d seen in the paper that launches her into a story, but Stiles loses the thread of the conversation when someone taps him on the shoulder. He turns with a smile that drops immediately when he recognizes the tapper.

“Chen, hello,” he says. “Please tell me you’re just here to say Merry Christmas?”

If Stiles didn’t know Chen any better, he would swear that a flicker of remorse crosses the Secret Service agent’s face as he says, “There’s a call for you at the desk, Mr. Stilinski.”

Ooh, this is _so_ not a good idea.

“Are you sure it’s for me?” Stiles asks. “Stilinski’s a very common name in some parts of the world.”

“The caller was very specific, Mr. Stilinski.”

Stiles is becoming all-too familiar with the little ball of white-hot rage that’s settling into his stomach. He turns back to Laura and Allen.

“I’m so sorry, but I have to take a call,” he says, kissing each of them on cheek quickly. “It’s a work thing, time-sensitive. Laura, would you mind keeping Allen company? I shouldn’t be gone for more than a few minutes.”

“No problem,” Laura says slowly, her eyes making the jump from Stiles to Chen and back. “Are you sure it can’t wait, though?”

“Just a few minutes,” he promises, then squeezes her hand again before following Chen, who carves an easy path through the party-goers.

In the elevator, Stiles adjusts his tie. It feels like putting on armor.

Chen leads him out on the thirtieth floor – _the last floor of the original structure_ , his brain supplies, always with the helpful bits of trivia – and leads him to a conference room that boasts a truly spectacular view of the French Quarter. Derek is sitting in one of the chairs, looking out over the city, and doesn’t hear them come in.

“You have _got_ to be kidding me,” Stiles says, laughing a little. “You _can’t_ be serious with this.”

“Stiles, hi,” Derek says, jumping to his feet. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Really? Because you sent your golden retriever here – no offense, Chen – to fetch me the way he did when we were sleeping together, and it didn’t really seem like saying _no_ was an option.”

“I thought you’d think it was funny,” Derek says, his face paling. “The ‘there’s a call for you at the desk’ line – I thought you’d think it was funny.”

“Hilarious,” Stiles deadpans. “Is there a reason I’m here? Because I have a date downstairs that I’d very much like to get back to.”

“Yeah,” Derek says, fumbling through his pockets for something. “When I saw your name on the RVSP list, this is the first place I knew I’d see you since I graduated. You haven’t been at the Fox & Hole any of the times I’ve been there.”

 _That’s because I figure out what events you’ll be in town for and avoid the gym those weeks_. “Since you graduated?”

Derek produces a bright blue envelope, folded over on itself to fit in his pocket. “You sent me this. Well, you sent this _back_ to me, actually.”

Oh. The card.

“Yes,” Stiles says.

“You sent it back to me unopened.”

“Yes.”

“You sent it back to me without reading it.”

“Yes.” _No. I recognized your handwriting on the envelope and shut it in a book and ignored it for two months, and then my dad died and you showed up at his funeral and I had a panic attack in front of you, and then I steamed the envelope open and read it ten times in a row and I_ almost _called you. I almost did._

“Will you read it now?” Derek holds the envelope out, offering it to him.

Stiles takes a calculated step backwards. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because this is a Christmas party, Derek, and I as I said before, I have a date downstairs that I’d very much like to get back to.”

“Right,” Derek says. “Allen.”

For some reason, it’s that one word of Derek’s – _Allen_ – in his nonchalant, I’m-Derek-Hale, I-know-all, the-world-bows-to-me vibe that acts as the catalyst for turning the ball of rage in Stiles’ gut into a blistering inferno.

“Yes,” Stiles says. “Allen. Dr. Allen Markings, a widely respected young neurosurgeon who doesn’t mind when I talk through movies and isn’t ashamed or afraid to hold hands with me in public. He is brilliant and kind and funny and he _likes_ me, and I like him, but instead of being downstairs enjoying the party with him, I am up here. With you. Because you _requested_ me.”

“I told you, I thought you’d think –.”

“That is was funny, yeah, you said. You thought I’d find it _amusing_ to be summoned to your side again.” Stiles takes a step forward, full of anger and hurt and frustration. “You do not _summon_ me. I do not work for you, I do not work for your mother, I do not take _orders_ , and you do not get to _summon_ me like we’re still screwing. That is something you do _not_ get to do.”

He turns on his heel to leave.

“Stiles, wait,” Derek says, catching at his elbow. Stiles pulls so violently out of his grasp that one of the seams on his jacket rips.

“ _Do not_ touch me,” he spits. “ _Ever_ again. Goodbye, Derek. Merry Christmas.”

 

***

In the taxi on the way back their hotel, Allen says, “Your ex was there, wasn’t he?”

“What?” Stiles asks, startled, pulling his eyes away from the late-night lit-up streets of New Orleans.

“I recognize that look and that mood,” Allen says. “Your ex, the one you don’t talk about. He was there, and you talked to him. And it didn’t go well.”

“I…yeah,” Stiles sighs. “I’m really sorry, Allen. I didn’t plan on it. I was actually hoping pretty hard that I _wouldn’t_ see him.”

“But you knew he’d be here.”

“He works for HaleEnt. I knew there was a pretty good chance.”

“You knew he’d be here, but you were hoping you wouldn’t see him. Why’d you come in the first place?”

Stiles knocks a knuckle against the window. “Because I’m not going to _not_ live my life because I’m afraid of running into my ex-boyfriend.”

“I can relate to that.” Allen’s quiet for a few minutes. Then, “He really did a fucking number on you, didn’t he?”

Stiles nods, slowly. “Yeah. I think I’m almost healed, though.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA. This is probably my favorite chapter to date. Except maybe the first one. 
> 
> Happiest of Halloweens to those of you in the States/celebrating that sort of thing! I have festivities to attend and am a little late responding to comments, but promise to reply to each and every one of you supremely luminous beings in the next few days :)
> 
> Chapter title is a lyric from 30,000 Feet by Molly Venter.


	8. dig them up, let's finish what we started

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You saved my sister’s life,” Derek says hoarsely. “You saved Cora’s life, you took a bullet for her, and you won’t take your pain meds and you’re hacking your chart and you’re harassing nurses about spirometers.”  
> “All of these things are true.”  
> “You took a bullet for her. God, Stiles, of all the – the idiotic, unplanned things you’ve ever done –.”  
> “Excuse me? What is the last thing I did that was idiotic or unplanned?”  
> “Besides jumping in front of a bullet?”  
> “Yes, Derek, besides jumping in front of a bullet!” Stiles hisses. “What was I supposed to do, let Cora get shot?”

**February, Year Four of Talia Hale’s First Term**

It’s a small, weak thread, but the S&A team latches on to Stiles’ telling Scott to check on Kate’s whereabouts and pulls – and the S&A team pulls hard. It’s not long before they start finding bits of evidence that don’t fit in. There’s an electronic record of Kate badging in and out of the hospital (which is where the formal investigation stopped), but Scott sweet-talks a few of the nurses into admitting that none of them remember seeing Kate that night. There were several patient emergencies, but nothing that they would have paged an internist for – although when Kira accesses the hospital’s paging system, she finds a page sent to Kate at 5:45PM on the day of the shooting, asking her to get to the hospital for a crashing patient immediately.

It’s circumstantial at best, and since Kate’s been taken into lockdown with the First Family, there’s no one to ask.

 

Despite his vow to be out by Monday, Stiles is still captive on Tuesday afternoon. The nurses tell him he can’t rush healing; he accuses them of weighting the little ball in the air thing.

“Would I do that?” The tube-pulling charge nurse, whose name Stiles now knows is Leonard, asks. He reaches over Stiles and checks the drip on his IV.

“Absolutely, Bones,” Stiles says. “I’m your favorite patient. You’d do anything to keep me around.”

“You keep hacking into your chart from your phone and changing all your dietary orders to curly fries. That shouldn’t even be _possible_ from the patient access side of the system.”

“That’s why it’s called hacking, Bones.”

“Stop calling me Bones, Stiles.”

"Only if you start calling me Kirk, Bones.”

“He giving you trouble?” Laura interjects, sticking her head in.

“Right here in River City,” Stiles says seriously, then, “Laura! Cora! Derek! The Hale sibling trifecta – they finally let you out of quarantine!”  

Leonard narrows his eyes. “Take your pain meds. Stop hacking your chart. No more harassing my nurses for extra spirometer tests.” He turns to the Hales, still hovering in the doorway. “You’re the president’s kids. Can I trust you to make him do as he’s told?”

“Not if it’s something he doesn’t already want to do,” Laura says.

Leonard heaves an overly dramatic sigh and leaves the room. The Hales crowd in – well, Laura and Cora crowd in. Derek sort of lingers.

Cora latches on to Stiles’ left hand, already getting teary.

“No crying,” Stiles tells her sternly. “Absolutely none. You’re alive, your family is alive, I’m alive. We did better than a lot of other people. So no crying.”

“Fine,” Cora sniffs, rubbing her eyes like she can force the tears to recede. “Do I at least get to say thank you?”

Stiles squints, considering. “Once. Only once.”

Cora nods. “Okay.” She leans her head down next to Stiles’ and softly kisses him on the cheek. “Thank you for saving my life.”

“My turn,” Laura says, kissing Stiles’ other cheek. “Thanks for saving my baby sister, Stiles.”

Cora and Laura both look expectantly at Derek, who’s still just inside the door.

Derek rubs a hand across the back of his neck, clearly uncomfortable. “Could I, uh – could I talk to Stiles alone for a minute?”

Laura and Cora make eye contact over Stiles’ bed for a split second, then Cora squeezes Stiles’ hand one more time and follows her older sister out the door.

For a long moment, Derek doesn’t say anything, apparently fixated on the tiles between his toes.

“You aren’t taking your pain medication?”

“I don’t need it.”

“You look like you need it.”

“…thanks,” Stiles says, loading his voice with sarcasm.

“Sorry, that’s not what I –.”

“No, I know, I was just…” Stiles drops his head back to the pillow, trailing off. “God, we _suck_ at this.”

Derek pushes a laugh out of his chest that sounds painful, but when Stiles’ looks up, he’s got telltale crinkles around his eyes. It’s genuine. “We didn’t used to suck at this.”

“We had banter down _pat_ during the campaign,” Stiles agrees.

Derek nods.

There’s an analog clock tick-tock-ticking away on the wall next to Derek’s head. Stiles makes a mental note to ask Leonard for a crowbar so he can jimmy it free and rip its gears out.

“You saved my sister’s life,” Derek says hoarsely. “You saved Cora’s life, you took a _bullet_ for her, and you won’t take your pain meds and you’re hacking your chart and you’re harassing nurses about spirometers.”

“All of these things are true.”

“You took a _bullet_ for her. God, Stiles, of all the – the idiotic, unplanned things you’ve ever done –.”

“ _Excuse_ me? What is the last thing I did that was _idiotic_ or _unplanned_?”

“Besides jumping in front of a _bullet_?”

“Yes, Derek, besides _jumping in front of a bullet_!” Stiles hisses. “What was I supposed to do, let _Cora_ get shot?”

“No, of _course_ not –.”

“Well, those were my only options,” Stiles states bluntly.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Tickity-fucking-tock.

“Sit down,” Stiles says, gesturing at the cot pressed up against the wall. “I’ve got a few things I need you to hear. Don’t look at me like that – this isn’t a near-death experience epiphany. I’ve actually been wanting to talk to you since New Year’s.”

Derek, still looking uncomfortable, lowers himself to the cot.

Stiles picks absentmindedly at his cuticles, wondering where to begin. Derek’s hand comes down lightly over his wrists, brushing against his IV catheter.

“Hey,” Derek says. “Just talk to me. Like we used to. I won’t tell anyone that you stopped being Stiles Stilinski of Stilinski & Associates for five minutes.”

He’s looking at Stiles all earnest and open, and Stiles has this entire speech worked out in his head because he’s been practicing for weeks, but when Stiles’ mouth opens, what he blurts out is “I forgive you,” and that definitely wasn’t the game plan.

Derek, evidently, wasn’t expecting this either. “What?”

“Shit,” Stiles says, shaking Derek’s hand off and rubbing at his eyes beneath his glasses. “That wasn’t how it was supposed to start. Well, cat’s out of the bag, I guess.” He drops his hands back into his lap and repeats, “I forgive you. For what happened on Election Day, for how you were during the campaign. All of it. Well, not for showing up at my dad’s funeral, because I still think that was a really shitty invasion of privacy, but – not the point, Stiles, stay on track.”

Stiles fidgets with the his fluids line, rolling the tiny tube back and forth. “I was in love with you, and you broke my heart, and I forgive you for that. You were always very clear about want you wanted out of us, and I wanted more, and it broke my heart when you said no.”

Stiles raises his eyes, wants to be looking directly at Derek for this. “You could’ve _just_ said no. Could’ve just keep telling both of us that you didn’t care about me at all, even though your twenty-two voicemails and infinite text messages and that card you sent me at graduation – God, Derek, that card was so fucking _unfair_ – seem to prove otherwise.”

“You read it?” Derek interrupts, clearly surprised by this news. “The card - I thought you didn’t open it. It was still sealed when you sent it back to me for _my_ graduation, and you told me you didn’t read it.

“Steamed it. And I lied.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Anyway. You could’ve just stuck with that story and left it there, but you didn’t. I can still see that exact moment in my head, you standing there saying, ‘I’m Derek _fucking_ Hale, why would there _ever_ be something between me and _someone like you_ ’ looking at me like I wasn’t worthy of even being near you and _Jesus,_ Derek, do you even _realize_ how badly you fucked me up with that? No, shut up, I’m talking.” Stiles says, waving his IV-free arm to cut Derek off when he opens his mouth. “You _knew_ about me getting outed and how hard I had to work to get to a place where I was okay with who I was. You _knew_ that I was uncomfortable being a Sheriff’s son on a campaign full of people with old money. And you still stood in front of me and picked the _exact words_ that you knew would tear me down.”

“Stiles, I--.”

“ _I am talking_.” Stiles pushes himself up a little higher on the bed. “You broke my heart, and I got over it in four weeks. What I’ve spent the last four _years_ figuring out and getting over is that you made me feel _ashamed_ to be who I was. You made me feel like I was less of a person than you, like I didn’t count for as much as you did, and I was sad and embarrassed and _destroyed_ by that, because I _let_ you. I _allowed you_ to make me less than what I am, Derek, and _that’s_ what I’ve been so upset about, because I swore that I’d never let anyone do that to me again.”  

“Stiles--,” Derek tries again, looking like he’s only a few seconds from tears or yelling or an aneurysm.

“Still talking. Just one more thing.” Stiles takes a deep breath, checking in with his internal compass. Yup, he still wants to do this. True north, here he comes. “I forgive both of us for that.”

Derek’s eyes widen even further. “What?”

“It’s been a long time,” Stiles says slowly. “I still don’t understand why you did it. I could guess, but unless you actually tell me at some point, I might never know. And I’ve made peace with that. And me – I was 23, and I had big dreams that were actually starting to come true. I was naïve and trusting, and I fell for the wrong guy. But I’m not that person anymore. I grew up and I learned, and I’m letting myself off the hook.”

 

***

 

Stiles is finally discharged late on Wednesday with strict instructions from Leonard and Allen for bi-weekly physical therapy, to call immediately if his pain gets above a 7 or if he has prolonged shortness of breath, and, most importantly, bedrest.

Naturally, as soon as Scott settles him into his apartment, makes sure he can get to the bathroom, stocks his kitchen with the essentials, and tells him to call if he needs _anything_ in the middle of the night, Stiles puts his shoes back on and – slowly and painfully, yes, stretching his stitches and stopping to catch his breath every ten steps – walks the mile to S&A.

“ _Bedrest_ ,” Stiles mutters disdainfully to himself, unlocking the door. “I’ve been in bed for eight days straight.”

He lets himself in and flips the main lights on, starting a pot of coffee on the way to his office. He’s always liked being here late at night, when he’s the only one around and his thoughts have space to spread out and float around, and –

There is someone sitting at his desk.

Stiles freezes with his hand still on the light switch, staring at the woman whose boots are propped up next to his keyboard, wondering if he has a chance of getting a mayday text to Isaac.

"Don’t,” she says when his fingers twitch toward his pocket. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk.”

“To talk?” Stiles repeats, slipping his left hand under the sling to press at his sore chest. “I don’t normally accept walk-in appointments after business hours.”

“You want to talk to me,” she says confidently. She stands up  and circles slowly around the desk, waving Stiles in the opposite direction. “You should sit down. Your ribs are still healing.”

Stiles walks as prompted, sinking tentatively into his chair and stifling his groan at the pressure change. “Who are you? How do you know about my ribs?”

“Your firm is looking into Kate Argent in connection with the attempt on the president’s life,” she says, answering neither question and looking at Stiles through a curtain of dark blonde hair.

“Yes, how do you --?”

“The feds are starting make that connection too,” she says. “Within the next two days, they’ll discover the gun used in the shooting, and they’ll find her prints on the barrel. They’ll arrest Kate, go back to Inova Fairfax, and start asking the same questions your team did. Kate will be tried, convicted, and sentenced for the attempted assassination of the President of the United States.”

Stiles sits back in his chair, stunned. “How do you know this? Who are you?”

She pulls a flash drive out of her pocket and slides it across the desk to him. “There’s a video on this drive that proves Kate Argent’s innocence.”

Stiles can’t even think. “What?”

“Isaac told me you know about B6-13,” she says, trailing her fingers along the edge of Stiles’ bookshelf. The back of her jacket rides up a little, and Stiles sees the gun tucked into the back of her jeans.

“The group he thinks I helped him get out of?” Stiles asks, his brain running a million miles an hour and making intuitive leaps he’s not sure he can land. “Not much – he called it Wonderland, said they’re the most powerful shadow organization in the country, like the CIA but on American soil. But he was…he was in a bad place back then. I haven’t been able to find any proof that it even exists.”

“You won’t,” she says, finally sitting down. “You won’t find any proof of our existence, because we kill every leak.”

Stiles is pretty sure his newly-repaired respiratory system isn’t capable of handling this. “What are you talking about?”

“Command sent me here to kill Isaac. He didn’t _get out_. No one gets out of B6-13. We found him here, working for you, a few months ago, and we were content to let him be for awhile because we’ve had other things on our plate. But when your firm started looking into Kate Argent, Command got nervous. Your team’s got quite the track record, Stiles, and _you_ have a proven bent on protecting the Hale family. Command knew you’d eventually figure out that Kate was being framed, and you’d keep asking questions, and since Isaac was one of the best B6-13 ever trained, he’d start to recognize Command’s hand in all of this. So they sent me here to kill him.”

“No,” Stiles says, shaking his head. “It’s not possible. The things Isaac’s told me he’s done, the things that were done to _him_ – he’s the way he is because his dad abused him when he was a kid. It’s PTSD, it’s his way of dealing with what happened.”

“B6-13 recruited him because his dad beat the shit out of him and that can turn kids into highly susceptible sociopaths,” she says matter-of-factly. “But the rest of it is training.”

“The same training you’ve had. Because you’re also B6-13.”

“Yes.”

“ _No_ ,” Stiles says vehemently. “This is insane. There is not a secret government organization of spies and assassins active in this country, that’s just…it’s _insane_. They’d never be able to cover it up.”

“We kill every leak.”

“So you’ve said.” Stiles covers his face with his hand, then stills in a moment of panic. “Wait, you’re here to kill him?”

“I didn’t say that. I said that Command sent me to here to kill him. Isaac knows I’m here; I’ve already talked to him. If I were going to kill him, he’d be dead by now.”

“Say I believe you,” Stiles says, faking at calm because this is so, so _very_ far outside his wheelhouse. “Say I believe that B6-13 is real, that they’re a secret government domestic covert ops cell, that you’ve one of them, that Isaac was one of them, that _they_ were somehow involved in the attempt on the president’s life. If you’re not here to kill Isaac for betraying your little club of murderers, _why are you here_?”

“My name is Malia,” she says, crossing one long leg over the other. “And I want the same deal you gave Isaac for covering up what happened on Election Day. I want you to get me out of B6-13.”

 

***

 

Stiles has called exactly one midnight meeting of the S&A team in two years, when Senator Lorgnette showed up outside his apartment in the middle of the night with a ransom letter for his daughter’s safe return in one hand and a box containing his daughter’s finger ( _Do not involve the police, unless you want Bella to lose another_ , the note had said) in the other.

This is the second.

“Kate Argent,” Stiles says, taping Kate’s picture up on the window when the last of the team rolls in, around 1AM. They sit around the table in various stages of my-boss-has-no-respect-for-work-life-balance apparel: Kira in bunny-printed pajamas, Scott in sweats, even Lydia arrives in yoga pants. Only Isaac is in his standard jeans-and-jacket uniform, hunched at the far corner of the table, warily watching Malia lean against the wall. “We facilitated her engagement to Derek Hale and have been looking into her as a suspect in the attempted assassination of President Hale. The evidence lining up against Kate is fabricated. She’s being framed for the shooting by powerful people.”

“Who’s doing the framing?” Scott asks, yawning into his coffee.

“I can’t tell you that,” Stiles says, and that gets the expected reactions from his team. Scott shrugs and accepts it; Lydia looks peeved; Kira looks like she’s not sure if she’s allowed to be annoyed. Isaac burrows deeper into his jacket. “Look, I know it’s not ideal, but it’s for your safety. The less you know right now, the better.”

“Okay,” Scott says, drawing out the “o”. “How do we know it’s a frame job? What proof do we have that Kate is innocent?”

“Kira, the video,” Stiles prompts, and Kira accesses the file on Malia’s flash drive using her tablet and duplicates her display up to the master monitor. Stiles doesn’t need to watch it again – he’d looped through the sped-up version three times in a row already. It shows an unconscious Kate being carried into a hospital supply room by two men in black masks, dropped on the floor, and remaining passed out for four hours straight. She eventually wakes up, looking incredibly confused, and stumbles out of the room. The timestamp starts at 6:02PM on the day of the shooting. He lets his team watch in silence, moving over to stand next to Malia.

“I’m still not sure I believe any of this,” he murmurs, pitching his voice as low as he can. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t,” she says simply. “But Isaac said you go with your gut. What’s your gut say about me?”

Stiles looks her over, considering. If he hadn’t known Isaac for five years, if he hadn’t spend an extensive amount of time around Secret Service agents, if he didn’t know what to look for in someone who consciously conceals their more _unique_ attributes, he’d probably think she just a run-of-the-mill, pretty young woman in DC. A staffer on the Hill, maybe, or a grad student. As it is, though, he notices the way her weight always stays over the balls of her feet, how her hands are preternaturally still, that she never leaves her back to an open door, how her would-be casual slouch seems just a little forced, designed to disguise a military posture. “Handle with care.”

She smiles just a little, the first hint of one he’s seen from her. “That’s probably a good instinct.”

“Is this real?” Kira asks, starting to fast-forward the video when they hit the long block of Kate lying still on the floor.

“It’s real,” Malia says, turning from Stiles. “I planted the surveillance cam in that storage room myself.”

“Follow-up question,” Lydia says. “Who the holy hell _are_ you?”

“Malia,” Malia says, ignoring the irritated look on Lydia’s face when she doesn’t expound.

“She’s an ally,” Stiles says, stepping between them. “For now, at least. The evidence against Kate will start to come to light in the next few days, and we need a plan.”

“To prove Kate’s innocence?” Scott asks. “Pretty simple, right? Wait until the evidence against her comes out, then leak the video to a news site and let them do the rest of the work.”

“If Kate was our client, absolutely,” Stiles says, taping another picture to the window. “But she’s not. Our client is Talia Hale, although she doesn’t know it.”

“You said you know who framed Kate, though,” Kira says. “So we already know who tried to kill the president. We find proof and go public.” 

“You’re not going to be able to find proof,” Malia says. “The people who did this, the people I work for – you’re not going to be able to prove that they did it.”

“She’s right,” Isaac speaks up. “We’re not even going to be able to prove that they _exist_.”

“Not any time soon, maybe,” Stiles admits. “We’re starting a marathon with this. It’s going to take a us a long time to get what we need, and if we clear Kate’s name in the meantime, we risk destabilizing the country’s faith in its leaders and defenders to find the people responsible. Without someone to convict for the attempted murder of the president, America will look weak to everyone else in the world.”

Lydia’s hand comes up to cover her mouth. “You want to let Kate take the fall.”

“I want to protect the republic,” Stiles nods, swallowing the hard lump in his throat.  “And if that means letting the rest of the world believe that an innocent woman did a terrible thing, then yes. For the time being, we let Kate take the fall.”

“Wait. Just – just wait,” Lydia says. “Stiles, this is _crazy_. You pull us out of bed in the middle of the night and drag us down here. You’ve got a conspiracy theory about framing a woman for the assassination attempt, but you won’t tell us who’s doing the framing, or why the framers want the president dead. Your only proof is a grainy video –.”

“Authenticating now,” Kira contributes, her fingers dancing across the keyboard.

“—a grainy video and the word of the mystery woman standing next to you whom Isaac’s avoiding like the plague, so we all know what _that_ implies. You’re not giving us the information we need to do this, Stiles.”

“You have what you need,” Stiles says. “Or, you’ll _make_ what you have be what you need. We’ve done it before.”

“Stiles –.”

“ _Lydia_. You are my family. The people in this room are my family, and I am telling you that by asking questions, you’re putting everyone here in danger. I will explain what I _can_ explain _when_ I can explain it. We don’t have time for you to have a crisis of faith right now, so just…internalize your righteous indignation for the next forty-eight hours and _help me_ get this done.”

“…fine,” Lydia snaps, yanking her hair into a messy topknot. “Fine. But we are having a serious talk about what _bedrest_ means when this is over. What do you need us to do?”

           

**April, Year Three of Talia Hale’s First Term (0.8 years ago)**

“Stiles?”

Stiles winces but doesn’t turn around. He’s not at this bar to chat, hook up, or see some long-lost friend from law school. He’s at this bar tailing a client’s stepmother, trying to prove that the third Mrs. Sahala is cheating on her husband and thereby triggering the infidelity clause of her pre-nup. He’s not even in his normal work clothes, dressing down to his old red hoodie and jeans to lessen the chances of being recognized. He’s had one hell of a week, and normally this would be a job for Isaac, maybe Kira or Scott, but he gave everyone else the night off as a reward for their excellent performance in the face of the Randall fiasco.

Stiles doesn’t take nights off.

He puts on his best “not in the mood” face, but it drops to something harsher immediately when he sees Derek shouldering his way ungracefully through the crowd. “Derek?”

“Stiles!” Derek crows again, throwing an arm around his shoulder, and _whoa_ , someone’s wasted. Stiles isn’t a small guy, but Derek’s got at least twenty pounds of muscle on him so he guides him onto a barstool, not trusting Derek’s balance. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” Stiles says drily, raising his voice just a little to be heard. “It’s a bar, Derek, I’m here getting a drink. What are _you_ doing here?”

“Celebrating!” Derek exclaims, sloshing his beer a little in his excitement. “I moved to the district! I’m the new director of HaleEnt DC!”

Stiles can’t help the pleased laugh that erupts out of his chest, and he wraps Derek in a hug before he even realizes what he’s doing. “Derek, that’s awesome! Congratulations.”

Derek drains the last of his beer and beams back at Stiles, and it almost feels like old times on the campaign trail when everyone on the team under 30 would gather in someone’s hotel room late at night, pass around bottle of whiskey or tequila, and play video games or watch movies or get into overly philosophical debates – anything to get a break from the constant, grinding pressure of campaign life. It almost feels like Derek isn’t the guy who shattered his heart into several thousand pieces, lit the pieces on fire, and danced over the flames. The last time Stiles saw Derek, he’d yelled at him thirty floors above a Christmas party. They time before that, Derek nearly knocked Stiles unconscious in a boxing ring.

“Bartender!” Derek howls, pulling Stiles out of his two-second trip down memory lane. One of the newer bartenders – Kaley, a grad student at American – makes her way over, wiping the counter and stacking empties as she does.

“Stiles,” she greets with a quick grin. “Stiles’ friend. What can I get for you?”

“Shots!” Derek responds. “Two shots! No, no – four shots!”

His enthusiasm startles a brief laugh out of Kaley, but she starts lining up the glasses on reflex. “Four shots of what, Stiles’ friend?”

“Alcohol!”

“…helpful,” she responds, then looks at Stiles. “Well?”

Stiles rolls his shoulders. There’s been no sign of Mrs. Sahala and it’s already almost 2AM, so he’s probably out of luck there. Tomorrow’s Sunday, and all he’s planning on doing is going for a run, watching the news, and maybe helping Jackson prep for the Giovanni hearing. Derek probably won’t remember any of this, and Stiles is really fucking tired of being angry at him.

“Maker’s,” Stiles sighs, flipping up his hood. Two shots won’t kill him on top of his half-nursed beer, but the last thing he needs is to be photographed getting the First Son drunk – well, more drunk.

They down the shots in quick succession, Derek cheering after each one, Stiles enjoying the pleasant warmth that starts in his stomach and works its way into his limbs. They fall back into old, pre-Election Day conversation patterns easily, and as the alcohol spreads through his system, he finds himself actually having fun.

“You know this is only the fifth time we’ve seen each other since your mom got elected?” He says, interrupting some rant of Derek’s about stock futures.

“No!” Derek shouts, outraged. “How?”

“Stanford graduation,” Stiles begins, counting on his fingers. “That time you came to Beacon Hills. The Fox & Hole last year. HaleEnt Christmas part a few months ago. Tonight.”

“That’s awful!” Derek whines, then his eyes widen and he grabs Stiles’ shoulder and pulls him closer, casting sideways glances down the bar, where Kaley is serving someone else. “Wait, wait, Stiles, I just realized – how did she know your name?”

“Who, Kaley?” Stiles laughs, following Derek’s anxious gaze. “Every bartender here knows me, Derek. I got the owners out of some trouble with a trumped-up illicit substances charge last year, and they’re repaying me in a lifetime of free beer.” He turns back to Derek and is startled by how close their faces suddenly are. “Whoa, buddy, what’s up?”

Derek leans closer, fixing Stiles with the hazel eyes he remembers all too well. “You have really pretty eyes. And freckles on your nose.”

Stiles puts a hand on Derek’s chest, pressing gently but firmly to keep the slight distance between them. “Dude. Stop. We don’t do this anymore.”

“But I’m _celebrating_ ,” Derek protests, his breath ghosting over Stiles’ lips. He shifts a hand down to the small of Stiles’ back. Stiles bats it away.

“Uh, Stiles?” Infinitely grateful for the distraction that breaks him out of the moment, Stiles turns his head to where Kaley is studiously _not_ looking at Stiles’ hand on Derek’s chest or Derek’s fingers trailing down Stiles’ arm. “Just a heads up that last call’s going to be in ten minutes. The bar will get rushed, and if you want to keep whatever is going on here private, you should probably find somewhere else to be.”

“You’re aces, K, thanks,” he says, pulling Derek’s hand out of his back pocket. “Now _you_. Behave.” He threads his fingers through Derek’s – it’s just to keep them from getting separated, he _swears_ – and tows him away from the bar toward the door. “How are you getting home?”

In the blink of an eye, Derek has him pressed up against a wall, lining up their bodies angle for angle. “Why don’t I just go home with you?”

“Because I don’t make a habit out of going home with guys too drunk to remember it the next day,” Stiles jokes, trying to keep the mood light, trying to figure out how to extricate himself from this without drawing attention, trying to figure out how he feels about what’s going on because he’s been pissed at Derek for a really long time, but it’s _Derek_.

Derek pushes in even closer, his voice dropping half an octave. “I missed you, Stiles.”

One hand sneaks between Stiles’ jeans and shirt to roughly palm at his bare skin, and it feels _familiar_ and _right_. “I missed you too,” Stiles says, struggling to think clearly. “But _we don’t do this anymore._ ”

“We could,” Derek teases, using his nose to trace Stiles’ jaw. “Just for tonight.”

Stiles pulls himself together just in time to turn his head to the side and drive his fist into Derek’s stomach with as much force as he can muster in the confined space. Derek lets out a giant woosh of air, makes a retching sound, and stumbles out the door clutching at his stomach.

Stiles takes a deep, steadying breath. _Just punched the president’s son. Again. Awesome._ He pushes away from the wall and pursues Derek, finding him puking into one of the little fenced-in tree enclosures a few buildings down. He waits for Derek to finish, then helps him down to sit on the curb with his head between his knees.

“I don’t forgive this,” he says after a few seconds, when Derek’s breathing evens out. “I’m working my way past what you did on Election Day, but you coming here tanked and trying to pull this shit again, trying pull me back in, playing your stupid little game because you’re lonely and bored? You won’t remember what you did and you won’t remember me saying so, but _I don’t forgive this_.”

Minutes pass. It’s unseasonably cold for April. Stiles hears last call from inside the bar.

“Give me your phone,” he says, crouching down and rifling none-too-gently through Derek’s pockets, eventually producing a battered iPhone that’s at least three generations old and still uses a passcode lock screen instead of standard biometrics.

“Fuck. Derek. _Derek_. What’s your passcode?”

Derek mumbles something about making banana bread and picks a leaf out of the street. He offers it to Stiles with a sleepy smile.

“God, you are such a fucker, you know that?” Stiles says, exasperated. “Okay – your birthday. Your mom’s birthday. Laura’s birthday. Your dad’s birthday. Cora’s birthday. 1234. 1111. Damnit, Derek, I only have two tries left, can you _just_ \--.”

Derek squints against the light of the screen and pokes at it on command. He screw up the first time, but the lock screen clears on the final try and Stiles sighs in relief, flipping immediately to Derek’s contact list and thumbing through, muttering to himself. “0617? Who do you know who was born on the seventeenth of June? No one, that’s who, I know everything about everyone you know – oh, thank fuck.” Stiles presses the icon to call the direct line to Luke, one of Derek’s Secret Service guys, praising whatever god is listening that Derek never changed their contact names from Merry and Pippin. “Luke? This is Stiles Stilinski. Yes, _that_ Stiles Stilinski. Look, I’m with Derek outside Cork, Stock, and Barrel – no, he’s definitely not in his apartment. Yes, it’s definitely Derek Hale. I don’t know, it’s not _my_ job to keep track of his every move, I’m just telling you that I’ve got Derek and he’s, like, sixty sheets to the wind. I figured calling you saves him a taxi ride with super chatty cabbie or wandering into the street and getting run over. I’ll wait here with him – yeah, on Lexington.”

He locks the phone again when Luke hangs up, the folds himself down to the curb to sit next to Derek. “You’re never going to stop making my life incredibly fucking difficult, are you?”

 

***

 

“I don’t think he’ll remember anything,” Stiles says, watching Chen arrange a now-sleeping Derek in the backseat of the black SUV. “He surrendered most of his stomach contents to that tree about fifteen minutes ago, though, so force him to drink some Gatorade or something before you put him to bed.”

“We’ll take it from here,” Luke assures him. “Thanks for getting him back to us – I’m still not sure how he got out without us seeing.”

“Probably something they taught him in the Air Force,” Stiles says. “Bastards, am I right?” He winks broadly at the two former Marines who’ve been on Derek Protection Duty ever since Talia was nominated at the Democratic National Convention.

“My thoughts exactly, Mr. Stilinski,” Luke says gravely, then shakes his hand and climbs into the driver’s seat.

"We’ll tell him you helped get him home safe,” Chen promises from the passenger seat.

“No, don’t,” Stiles blurts. “It’s just – it’s better if – you guys know what happened,” he stutters, resigning himself to being slightly mortified in front of Secret Service agents for the umpteenth time in his life. “It’s better if he doesn’t know I was here or that we talked. If he doesn’t remember, could you just…not tell him? He got drunk with his friends, one of them called you for pickup, you took him home. That’s all he needs to know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The bar scene! FINALLY!
> 
> OKAY SO: If you don't watch Scandal, you might be a little confused by the introduction of B6-13. They're a super-secret spy organization that functions as an extension of the US government, but they're not controlled by the US government. They kill all sorts of peeps "for the good of the republic," are lead by a shadowy figure called Command, and it's strongly implied that they're the only people in DC with real power. 
> 
> This brings me to my next, all-important announcement: This is going to be a series! Probably three fics all told - I'm still hashing out the long-term story arcs and planting the flashback sequences. I'm super excited, you should be super excited, it's going to be excellent, I'm in love with all of you for your support, etc etc etc. Send me any ideas/requests!
> 
> Chapter title is a lyric from Flaws by Bastille.


	9. the love i sell you in the evening, by morning won't exist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Did you kill her?”  
> “No.”  
> “Did you have her killed?”  
> “No.”  
> “Are you telling me the truth?”  
> Stiles stabs a piece of Kung Pao Chicken out of a carton with vehemence. “Stop asking questions, Derek.”

**February, Year Four of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“Sign here and here,” Stiles says, pointing at the blanks at the bottom of the report. Derek scrawls his signature as requested and slides the papers back to Stiles, who looks them over and tucks them into a folder.

“And now you scan that to your external drive?” Derek asks, recalling Stiles’ words from the first day they sat in this office, almost five months ago.

“And destroy the hard copy, yes,” Stiles says.

“So it’s over? We’re done?”

Stiles sits back in his chair, adjusting for the arm still bound in a sling across his chest. “It’s over.”

 _Liar_ , Derek wants to say. It’s not over. He knows it’s not over. By the time the investigators found the rifle with Kate’s prints, Kate was gone, in the wind, just _vanished_ overnight. It’s been four days, and there still hasn’t been a single reported sighting of her anywhere in the world. The most wanted woman on the planet, her face on every news channel in every language, and _nothing_.

Derek feels…dirty. Used. Idiotic. Sure, he’d only known Kate for three months, but still – shouldn’t there have been signs? Big, flashing, neon signs pointing straight to _YOUR GIRLFRIEND IS GOING TO TRY TO KILL YOUR FAMILY_? But no, Derek had actually been _happy_ with her. She’d been beautiful and smart and funny and kind. Right up until the moment she’d aimed a sniper rifle at his mother’s head.

On top of that, Stiles is hiding something. It’s obvious. In the past few days, Derek has spent a _lot_ of time in this office, working the with team to make sure his image comes out okay, that he’s distanced from Kate’s crazy in the press, that his campaign won’t suffer, and he keeps walking in on whispered conversations that stop the instant he’s in earshot. He hears Scott conversing with someone on the phone in what sounds like Portuguese. There’s a new woman hanging around the office, all long blonde hair and quiet moments with Stiles.

Derek thinks they might be looking for Kate.

But that’s not why he’s here today. He came in under the premise of signing Stiles’ final case report, but he has ulterior motives.

“So, if that’s over,” he says, still chanting _liar liar liar_ in his head, “I’d like to hire you.”

Stiles tilts his head. “Excuse me?”

“Be my campaign manager.

“Ex- _cuse_ me?”

“You know you’re the best,” Derek says. “You know my family, you know my stance on issues, you know how to handle all of this Kate shit. Run my campaign.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Stiles asks, clearly choosing his words with great care.

Derek smiles. “You haven’t yelled at me in public _or_ private in well over a month. I think we’re making progress.”

“If this is about what I said in the hospital –.”

“It’s not,” Derek promises. “Not _entirely_ , anyway, but I _do_ think the fact that you could tell me all of that means that we might, maybe, _someday_ stand a chance of being friends.” _Plus, the flame I’m still carrying for you is burning away like the Little Engine that Could. Choo choo, motherfuckers._

Stiles chews on the tip of one of his pens. “I have a job here, Derek. I can’t just pack up and hit the campaign trail with you.”

“It’s just a gubernatorial race, nothing like the presidential one. You can run it from here until a few months before hand. You’d be out of DC two, three months tops. I’m sure Scott and Lydia can keep this town from tearing itself apart for that long.”

Stiles sighs and picks at a thread that’s pulling away from his sling. “I’ll think about it.”

 

**March, Year Four of Talia Hale’s First Term**

 

“You never told me what you did,” Derek says suddenly. “To take care of what happened on Election Day.”

It’s been five weeks since Stiles agreed to be Derek’s campaign manager. Five weeks of dinner meetings since they’re both so swamped with their day jobs, five weeks of Skype calls to Deaton and Maddie on the president’s campaign trail to make sure Talia Hale and Derek Hale’s messages line up when appropriate and diverge when necessary; five weeks of the S&A team (plus Malia, who seems to be a somewhat permanent fixture) still keeping something big from Derek. He’s taken to sneaking his questions in at random, trying to catch Stiles off guard.

So far, the score stands at Stiles: 14, 399 and Derek: 0.

“Oh,” Stiles says, looking surprised. “No, I didn’t.”

“Are you ever going to?”

“Probably not.”

“Did you kill her?”

“No.”

“Did you have her killed?”

“ _No_.”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

Stiles stabs a piece of Kung Pao Chicken out of a carton with vehemence. “Stop asking questions, Derek.”

“Is that why you still hate me?”

Stiles’ fork stops moving. “What?”

“If you won’t tell me what you did, fine, but you had to do it because of me. Is that why you still hate me?”

The fork starts moving again. “I don’t hate you.”

“You won’t look at me.”

Stiles makes a big show of putting his fork down, folding his hands together, and looking up at Derek. “I don’t hate you.”

 

**May, Year Four of Talia Hale’s First Term**

 

“Look,” Scott says, pressing up nose-to-nose with Derek in the dimly-lit S&A office when Stiles steps out to take a call. “I get that you’re trying to be a better person now. Stiles vouched for that. Good for you. But I know what happened between the two of you. He told me the entire goddamned saga of the campaign and Election Day. Gave me a fake name when it was actually happening because Stiles is the single most loyal person on the face of the planet, but told me everything.” 

“Scott, I’m sorry that--.”

“ _Do not_ apologize to me,” Scott hisses. “ _I_ am not the person you apologize to. _I_ am the person who had to help Stiles pick up the millions of pieces you shattered him into and put them back together. _I_ am the person who had to help him put them back together again and again and _again_ after Stanford graduation, the funeral, Fox  & Hole, the Christmas party, the bar. God, if I’d known that you were _you_ at the Sheriff’s funeral, I probably would’ve taken you apart with my bare hands, and every single person in that room would have helped me if I stopped to explain.”

“Scott…”

“Shut. Up.” Scott seems to force himself to take a step back, exhaling heavily through his nose. “He’s starting to trust you again. He threw himself in front of a _bullet_ for your sister, and he’s managing your goddamned campaign, I don’t know how and I don’t know why but you’re making him trust you again. Since I wasn’t able to give you the best friend speech the first time around, here’s the new and improved version.”

“Is this where you tell me that if I hurt him again, you’ll kill me?” Derek asks. “I’m not going to. I swear, it’s different now.”

“Great to hear,” Scott says without inflection, and there’s a wolfish quality to his grin. “But no, this isn’t that talk. This is when I tell you about Stilinski & Associates, and how Stiles is the very, very best of us. He found us dark and damaged and with secrets of our own, he built us into each other with brick and mortar and dynamite, he made us dangerous by trusting us with the most volatile secrets of the most powerful people on the planet. I hold all the cards in congressional blackmail; Lydia has the balls of the most important men in the world in the palm of her hand; Kira hacks federal databases with one hand and leaks unreleased albums with the other; Isaac keeps a jar of the teeth he’s pulled out of people’s heads under his desk. Stiles trained us, turned us into the weapons he can use to bring down the republic if that’s what he wants. You know our reputation. It’s why you came to us in the first place.”

“…so if I hurt him again, you’ll kill me,” Derek repeats, and he immediately regrets his sarcasm when Scott’s smile takes a definite turn toward terrifying.

“You’re not listening, Derek. Stiles doesn’t need _protection_ , because he is the _best_ of us. You’ve seen him drive a presidential campaign and a gubernatorial campaign and you’ve seen him handle finding you someone to marry, but that’s friendly Stiles, altruistic Stiles, stars-and-stripes-forever Stiles. You’ve never seen him take someone on for a _personal_ reason, but I have, and how personally do think he’s going to take it if you hurt him again? Because he’ll come after you _himself_ , and I’ve got to tell you, he might have only done it three times, but those people don’t even fucking _exist_ anymore.”

Scott leans in a little closer. “Use your big Harvard brain, Derek. Who should you be more afraid of – the things that go bump in the night, or the man that taught us how?”

 

***

 

“Hey. Who’d you personally go after in the past?”

“What?” Stiles asks distractedly, looking up from his laptop. They’re sitting in the living room of Derek’s New Orleans loft, on a weekend trip to glad-hand some early donors to the campaign. Stiles is wearing his glasses and TARDIS-printed pajama pants, and Derek would really, _really_ like to take Stiles into the bedroom right about now.

“It’s just something Scott mentioned before we left yesterday. He said that you’ve only ever personally gone after three people. Not as cases, more like…vendettas?”

Stiles sets his computer aside, and the reflection from the screen in his lenses shifts so Derek can see the hint of a warning in his eyes. “He said three people, or that it happened three times?”

Derek thinks back through the conversation with Scott. “Uh, times, I think.”

Stiles nods. “Do you remember asking me why everyone on my team is so damaged? Back when you first started dating Kate.”

“I think so,” Derek says, not really following the line of this conversation. “After I made some stupid comment to Kira and Isaac almost broke my arm.”

Stiles nods. “Scott, Lydia, and Kira are damaged because people damaged them. I damaged back.”

Derek lets that sink in. Stiles is still watching him closely, probably gauging his reaction. “And Isaac?”

Stiles taps one of his fingers against the toe of his shoe. “Still a work in progress.”

“And Malia?”

Stiles’ entire face sharpens. “What do you know about Malia?”

“Nothing,” Derek says, taken aback. “She’s just been…around. A lot.”

“Oh.” Stiles gets up and heads to the kitchen, reaching for a glass above the sink. “Malia’s not really part of the team. She’s just…helping.”

"You seem to get along pretty well,” Derek says, standing up and following Stiles to the kitchen.

“Don’t do this, Derek,” Stiles says, filling his glass with tap water.

“Don’t do what? All I said was –.”

“Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, don’t _ever_ ask about my team’s pasts, don’t push our still _extremely_ fragile friendship beyond what it can take.” Stiles takes a sip of his water and walks around Derek, back to the couch. “Now, the revitalization part of the stump speech still isn't right. From the top." 

 

**August, Year Four of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“You’re the guy from the pictures, aren’t you?”

“What pictures?” Stiles yawns, crossing out a line of one of Derek’s press releases with a green Sharpie. He gets more of the ink on the inside of his middle finger than the paper, the green stain spreading out through all the little grooves in his skin. 

Sometimes Derek wishes he had a map of Stiles that worked like that. Turn right here, left there, two rights and the second left through that roundabout. Follow the green ink - this way to his hand, his head, his heart. Instead, Derek feels like a blind driver headed toward a distant horizon. Or like he's playing Oregon Trail, and his oxen keep drowning when he tries to ford the river. 

It's also  _really_ late, and Derek is  _really_  tired. 

"The Cork, Stock, and Barrel pictures from last April. The ones that made me and my mom think I needed a wife. You’re the guy in the red hoodie.”

Stiles caps the Sharpie and tries to balance it on his knee; it immediately rolls off to the carpet of Derek’s HaleEnt DC office. “When did you figure it out?”

“A couple weeks ago,” Derek says, trying to read Stiles’ face. “Scott mentioned something about a bar awhile back, and you wore a red hoodie on your morning run. I just remembered a bunch of things about that night all at once.”

“Oh.” Stiles says. “How much do you remember?”

“Honestly, not much.” Derek sighs and leans back in his desk chair. “I remember meeting Paige and Michael and Will. I remember seeing you standing by the bar. I remember suggesting that I go home with you.” Derek winces at that. “I was _really_ drunk, wasn’t I?”

“You threw up on a tree. Twice, actually.”

“That part, I’m okay with not remembering,” Derek laughs. He doodles a little robot in the margin of his desk calendar. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Loaded question,” Stiles hedges. “You were – jeez, you were _awful_ that night, Derek, and I was hurt and confused. And then when you and your mom showed up in my office so upset and worried about the whole thing. I didn’t want to have to relive it, and I didn’t want to drag you through it. After a while, it had just gone on too long. I figured you’d find out eventually – honestly, I thought Luke or Chen would have snapped long before now – and we’d deal with it then. Are you mad?”

“At you? No, not at all,” Derek says, pleased to find that his words ring true. “I’m just sorry for being such an ass.”

 

**September, Year Four of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?” Cora asks the night before Derek leaves for his potentially permanent move back to Louisiana. Campaigning starts in earnest on the first of October.

"Yes,” Derek says bluntly, taping over another box. Packing is exhausting.

“Holy shit, I didn’t think you’d actually admit it that easily.”

“You wore me down,” Derek says wryly. “Are you going to help or are you going to sit there and drink my beer?”

“You’re moving tomorrow. You can’t take the beer with you. Ergo, I _am_ helping. Are you going to tell him?”

“Am I going to tell my campaign manager that I’m in love with him?” Derek drops the tape and swipes Cora’s beer, taking a sip. “Can’t say that it’s on my immediate to-do list.”

“Oh, come on. He’s not just your campaign manager, he’s your…your…”

“Go on, I’m _dying_ to know who you end up comparing us to.”

Cora throws a pretzel at him. “Oh! He’s the Hermione to your Ron.”

Derek catches the pretzel and eats it. “Didn’t Rowling say that she wishes she hadn’t made them get together in the end?”

"Not the point. The _point_ is that it took them seven years to get together, but the signs were there all along and everyone knew they were meant to be.”

“…again, except the actual _author_.”

“Shut up.”

“And me and Stiles have only known each other for four and a half years, are you saying I have to wait two and half more?”

Cora steals the beer back and smiles blithely up at him. “Don’t you have packing to do?” 

Derek wipes condensation off on his pants and dutifully returns to packing, draping a long dropcloth over his sofa. Cora offers unhelpful advice from the kitchen table and scrolls through something on her phone.

“The past couple months have been really good,” Derek says quietly once the dropcloth is finally in place. He moves to the kitchen and gets a beer of his own, leaning against the bar. “We’ve spent so much time together working on the campaign. We’re finally…I don’t know, _friends_. We can watch movies together again, and he always orders half the pizza with extra olives for me. He loaned me a book a few weeks ago and we spent the plane ride back from Baton Rouge debating the relationship between Siddhartha and Govinda."

Cora offers him the bowl of pretzels. “And you don’t want to jeopardize that.”

Derek nods. “We talk and we laugh and we joke and sometimes he looks at me like he used to, but what if it’s all in my head? What if I tell him and he doesn’t feel the same way? What if he’s moved on? I hurt him _really_ badly, Cora. How do I know if I’ve made up for it?” 

She spins her bottle cap on a fingertip. “Are you going to hurt him again?”

“What? No, of course not.”

"Don’t answer so quickly,” she says, stopping her fidgeting and looking him dead in the eye. “Actually think about it. You’re not really used to putting someone besides yourself first in a relationship, D, and you need to honestly think about whether or not you’re going to end up hurting him again. Laura and I sided with you the first time around because you’re our brother, and Stiles forgave you because apparently he’s a saint with a redemption kink, but if you fuck everything up again? He deserves better.”

Derek traces the lip of his beer bottle, collecting little drops that pool and run against the ridges in his fingertip. “I know.”

 

**November, Talia Hale’s Campaign (3.8 years ago)**

One of the things Stiles loves most about the Hale family is how unabashedly they embrace being a dynasty. The Hales have ruled Louisiana for generations, Hale Enterprises has them on the map in every region of the country, and they turn up in droves on Election Day to celebrate their crowning glory: a Hale in the White House.

Talia’s victory speech is the sweetest thing he’s ever heard. (And not just because he played a big part in writing it, although hearing his words coming from the president-elect’s mouth on an international broadcast is insanely freaking amazing.)

Two hours after they formally called the race in favor of Hale/McKinney, Stiles is _finally_ wrapping the pressroom – after ten straight hours of coverage. But this is what he and Maddie and all his other little press minions have been prepping for for weeks, and he’s glorying in his moment. He spins and evades the policy questions that they haven’t set courses for yet (healthcare, international involvement, the Bahrain situation); he gives strong, soundbyte-friendly answers for their platform’s basic tenants (gun control, tax reform, education);  every now and then he has to pretend to cough into his elbow to hide the gigantic smile that keeps threatening to take over his face.

They did it.

They did it, they actually placed the first female President of the United States in office. Millions of little girls across the world just saw a dream become reality; the millions of older women who started fighting for this before Talia was even born just saw the fruits of their labor recognized. And the best part, the _very best part_ , is that Talia is so, so much more than just a woman. She is strong and intelligent and decisive, she has friends on both sides of the aisle from her time in Congress – she actually has the power to effect real change.

And Stiles was part of it.

He feels accomplished and fulfilled, but most of all, he feels…hungry. Antsy. Ready for the next thing, the next challenge. There’s a whole world out there just _waiting_. Stiles has had his first taste, and there’s no turning back.

“And how about you, Stiles?” Matt, a reporter from the _Post,_ asks, finally having exhausted every question they could possible ask about the president-elect, her family, and her immediate plans. “Will we be seeing more of you once President-Elect Hale moves into the White House? Press Secretary, perhaps?”

A few of the other reporters actually cheer and clap, and a funny little bubble of pride and happiness wells up in Stiles’ chest. He is good at this, damn good, and they actually like him.

“Sadly for all of you, no. I’ll be transitioning this role over to Greenberg, whom you know from Vice President-Elect McKinney’s team.”

Someone in the back of the room swears. Someone else quips, “Off the record.” Everyone laughs.

“Can we ask why?” Matt follows up when the laughter dies down.

“I’ve got a law school degree to finish,” Stiles says, the words bittersweet against his tongue. He’s had time to adjust to the idea, and objectively, he knows that Deaton made the right call for _Stiles’_ future, not just the Hale administration. “Can’t leave Stanford hanging.”

“And to those who’ll say that you peaked at 23 and burned out?” 

“Sorry, who was that?” Stiles asks, leaning around the podium.

A woman with long black hair steps out from behind a camera. “Kali, from the _Daily Report_.”

“Kali,” Stiles says, giving her a smile. “It’s nice to meet you, but you must be new here. You haven’t seen the last of me. And that’s it, folks – the lid is on. Go join the party, have a good night, and I’m sure Clark is already accepting bets on the first hundred days.”

Amidst the general laughter and chaos that follows his statement as the press break down their equipment and head out, Stiles gives himself ten seconds to set his forehead against the podium and just soak in the crazy.

At second six, Maddie flings herself at him, getting spirals of curly black hair in his mouth. “You were awesome,” she says, hugging him tightly. “This was awesome. Thank you.”

He hugs back even tighter, counting his last four seconds, then pushes her away gently. “Did you take the follow-up from Kevin about the tabled healthcare bill?” He asks, tucking his portfolio into his bag and slinging it across his chest. He pulls his cell phone out and starts tapping notes, leading the way out of the pressroom. “And the Bahrain thing is shaping up to be a nightmare – you’ll need to work with Greenberg and Deaton to put some sort of statement out within the next week, because they’re just going to keep asking and you can’t afford to look unprepared this early on. General Montgomery will need to give input on that, obviously, so make sure to get in touch with his people tomorrow. And make sure --.”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Maddie interrupts, grabbing the strap of his bag and using it to forcibly stop him. She pries his phone out of his hand and tucks in into of the bag’s side pockets, then pulls the entire thing over his head. “This is not what you’re doing right now.”

“Oh?” Stiles asks, trying to snatch his bag back and utterly failing. “Then what am I doing?”

Maddie pushes at one of his shoulders until he turns around, and he realizes where they’re standing – at the entrance to the hotel’s grand ballroom, where hundreds of people are dancing and cheering, balloons and confetti strewn everywhere, and a live jazz band (flown in from New Orleans just for the occasion) is playing every up-beat patriotic tune known to man.

“Oh,” Stiles says.

“Yes, _oh_ ,” Maddie agrees. She sets his bag down under a table at by the wall. “We’ve got three days to finish your transition, so do what you told the press to do and go. Celebrate. Everything will still be here in the morning.”

Stiles is tempted, truly tempted, but there’s still so much to do and he’s about to try a feint-and-dive at his bag when Cora appears in front him, beaming brightly.

“Stiles! We’ve been looking for you everywhere! Come dance!”

Stiles’ protests are weak in the face of a Hale’s indomitable will, so he follows begrudgingly, swearing to himself that he’ll be back on his laptop within twenty minutes.

It’s two hours before Stiles even thinks to look at his watch. Dancing and talking and shaking hands with dozens of Hale relatives, toasting their success with Derek and Laura and Cora, recounting favorite moments of the campaign with other team members, meeting Terrance's wife (and wasn't _that_ a surprise). Eventually, close to midnight, Chen taps Stiles on the shoulder and tells him there’s a call at the desk for him– a system he and Derek worked out a few weeks back. Stiles makes his excuses, saying it’s probably his dad, and snags his bag on the way.

They’ve been staying at this hotel for a week and a half, so Derek and Stiles have had time to memorize all the rarely-frequented spots. The back hallway, between the kitchen (closed this time of night) and one of the fire exits, is perfect for them. Stiles rounds the corner and Derek immediately has him pressed against the wall, kissing him deeply, and Stiles drops his bag to the ground to kiss back.

“You were amazing today,” Derek says, gravel in his voice as his finger loosen Stiles’ tie. “They showed some of the pressroom footage in the ballroom. Amazing.”

“It’s incredible,” Stiles breathes, undoing the buttons on Derek’s shirt. “We actually did it. She won.”

“Let’s not talk about my mom right now,” Derek says, shutting Stiles up by roughly shoving a hand down the front of his pants.

There’s a thrill to it – knowing someone could round the corner at any second. It’s a calculated risk, Stiles supposes. A stupid, unnecessary risk, but he’s had several flutes of champagne and no food and it turns Derek on and Stiles really, really can’t say no when Derek starts talking in the voice that means he’s going to take his sweet time. And he does, because Derek follows through on things like that, one of the very many reasons why Stiles is absolutely in love with him.

Derek freezes, and Stiles, in a moment of terrible clarity, realizes that he’s been talking out loud this entire time.

Derek withdraws his hand and slowly backs away to the opposite wall, staring at him, horrorstruck. “What did you say?”

“It – ah – what did you hear?” Stiles stalls for time, tucking himself away and zipping back up.

“You love me,” Derek says in a monotone, and that’s a clear warning sign for how the rest of this conversation is going to go.

“I – I mean – yes,” Stiles sighs, and relief at having finally admitted it out loud races through him. “Have for a few weeks.”

Derek is still staring. “You _can’t_.”

“Well, I do,” Stiles says, taking a tentative step forward, trying not to spook him. “And I think you maybe love me, too.”

Derek shakes his head. “No. No, we agreed. No emotions, no getting attached.”

“Yeah, and we’ve both broken that.”

“ _I_ haven’t,” Derek says, holding out a hand so that Stiles can’t get any closer.

Stiles stops moving forward, but reaches out to interlace his fingers with Derek’s. “We’ve spent every night together since Charlotte, and only had sex ten times in those three weeks. You write little notes in the margins of my books, and I don’t want to kill you for it. I talk straight through movies, and _you_ don’t want to kill _me_ for it. You look at me across a table when something makes you smile to see if I get the joke, I look at you whenever a plane or chopper flies too close overhead to make sure you’re okay.”

Derek is still staring, now at their linked hands, still suspended in the space between them.

“It’s okay if you’re scared, it’s okay if you don’t want to admit it, it’s okay if you’re not ready,” Stiles says. “But please, Derek, _please_ stop telling me that you don’t care about me at all, because that just fucking _hurts_ , and I don’t deserve it.”

Stiles feels it happening before he sees it, and he sees it before Derek says anything. It’s in the way Derek’s fingers stiffen and pull away, in the shift in Derek’s posture, in the way his jaw sets, the glint that emerges in his eyes. After all these months together, Stiles can read Derek like a news brief, but he still doesn’t have time to brace himself for what comes out of Derek’s mouth.

“You were a fun fuck,” Derek says, “but that’s it.”

“Derek, _please_.”

“I’m done,” Derek says, shoving at Stiles’ shoulders, forcing him to stumble back to the wall. “I told you not to get your personal shit involved. Your _feelings_ aren’t my problem.”

Stiles feels like his entire body is shutting down. “Please don’t do this.”

Derek smirks at him. “Are you honestly trying to tell me that you didn’t see this coming?”

“You’re lying,” Stiles says, his voice breaking over the last syllable.

“No, Stiles, you’re just lying to yourself,” Derek says. He re-buttons his shirt, adjust his tie, does up his belt, runs a hand through his hair. He is putting himself back together and tearing Stiles apart at the same time. “I’m Derek fucking Hale. Did you really think there could be something serious between me and someone like you?”

There are clear moments for Stiles that he can point to and say, “That’s when my life changed.” When his parents asked him what he wanted for his eighth birthday, expecting answers like video games or a special edition Batman comic, but he requested a trip to Washington, DC. When Charlie Darling, Beacon Hills High’s biggest jackass, outed him to the entire senior class. When the doctor came back with his mom’s test results. When Alan Deaton called to offer him a spot as a temporary speechwriter on Senator Talia Hale’s fledgling presidential campaign.

The moment Kali, the reporter from earlier, steps into full view at the end of the hallway with her camera balanced on one shoulder, doesn’t make the list.

“Okay, so I have to say, I’m not even sure what my favorite part of that was.” Kali says, sauntering closer. “Derek Hale, the president-elect’s son, creating a mild gay sex tape. Derek Hale, the president-elect’s son, creating a mild gay sex tape _with his mother’s press secretary_. Or Derek Hale, the president-elect’s son, being a completely heartless bag of dicks to his mother’s press secretary immediately after creating a mild gay sex tape with him. I’ll probably just let it roll out in installments, because this shit is gold.”

Stiles’ brain is in overdrive before she’s even done talking, so he catches Derek’s arm when he goes to take a threatening step toward her. “Don’t bother with the camera. It’s probably got real-time upload using Wi-Fi, right?”

Kali grins. “Points for having a brain, Stiles. Shame that you can’t use it to pick better men.”

Stiles can almost hear the high-pitched whining noise his brain would be producing if his neurons were made of metal. He grins right back at Kali. “Give us a moment, would you?”

Without waiting for a response, he drags Derek a few yards down the hall. He pushes Derek towards the fire exit, blocks the way back with his body, and says, “Go. I’ll handle this.”

Derek looks at him like he’s out of his mind. “We have to do something.”

“No, _I_ have to do something. And I can’t do what I need to do until you’re not here anymore, so _go_.”

“Stiles --.”

“Shut. Up. Stop talking. The longer you stand here, the worse it gets.”

“ _Stiles_ \--.”

“ _Derek._ If you have ever trusted me about _anything_ , trust me on this. _Leave_.”

Stiles blinks, and Derek is gone. He pushes all the air out of his lungs and takes in a new breath, rolling out his neck. Okay. He can do this.

Turning on one heel, he walks back up the hallway to Kali, who’s replaying her material. Stiles hears a tinny version of his voice giving Derek an impassioned speech. “I’m sorry that you got caught up in this Stiles, I really am,” she says. “You seem like a good guy. Guess you were right when  you said we hadn’t seen the last of you.”

Stiles quirks up one side of his mouth. “You saw a little more than I bargained for.”

She pulls the disc out of the side of the camera and offers it to him. “Upload to my private site is done. I’m going to ask the Hales for five hundred thousand dollars. Agree to an exclusive tell-all with me, and I’ll cut you in for fifty.”

“So, just to be clear,” Stiles says, twirling the disc between his thumb and index finger. “You’re going to extort the Hales, take their money, and still run the story.”

She smiles again, something barbaric playing around the curve of her lips. “The public deserves to know the truth about the all-hallowed Hales. And I deserve to be handsomely rewarded for bringing that truth to light.”

… _this_ is the moment that makes Stiles’ list of life-altering events. Because he knows, in this instant, that the next step he takes is going to define him for a long time to come. And he _wishes_ he didn’t, but he wavers. Because he is _hurt_ , because he is _devastated,_ because he wants Derek to _pay._ It would be so, so easy to take Kali's deal. The press loves him; he can play the victim and have Derek publicly crucified. 

But he thinks of Talia Hale. And how even after every dark moment on the campaign, seeing a run-down and bone-weary Talia snap at hapless volunteers, questioning the wisdom of keeping her creepy brother Peter on as an advisor, he still truly, honestly, at his core believes – no, _knows_ – that she is what the country needs. He thinks of newly eight-years-old Stiles, boarding his very first plane on the way to DC. He thinks of eighteen-year-old Stiles, hiding in a bathroom stall for hours after Charlie made his announcement on the school news. He thinks of his mom, her paper-thin hand on his cheek, telling him to be brave and strong and good.

“So?” Kali asks, interrupting Stiles’ internal epiphanies. “Partners?”

Stiles methodically snaps the disc into four pieces. “Guess I was right about something else earlier, too – you must be new here.”

She narrows her eyes. “You can’t be serious. After what I just saw, you’re siding with them?”

“Talia Hale’s my guy,” Stiles says simply. “That doesn’t change because one of her kids turned out to be a bastard. So, you’re not going to the Hales. I’m going to get my laptop out, you’re going to log into your private site, and I’m going to clear your cache and corrupt all your data.”

“Oh really?” She laughs. “You’re not even going to offer me hush-hush money?”

“Money doesn’t keep people like you quiet, not when you’re sitting on something of this magnitude,” Stiles says, tucking his hands into his pockets and making a mental note to drop the disc fragments into the next furnace or vat of acid he walks by. “There are only two forces that keep this sort of thing under wraps: belief that you’re doing the right thing, and fear.”

“Fear? The 23-year-old whiz kid is going to threaten me?”

“I’d really rather not,” Stiles admits. “But if it comes down to that, I won’t be the one threatening. Actually, my colleague doesn’t really _threaten_ , he just…gets results. But like I said, I’d rather not go that route. Please, Kali, _think_ about the consequences of releasing that video. Talia Hale is on track to be the best thing that’s happened to this country, possibly to the entire world, in half a century. She’s _exactly_ what we need, and her staff is going to being incredible, and her administration will be legendary. But if you release that video, it all goes out the window.”

Stiles rocks back on his heels, realizing the truth of his words even as they continue to pour out of his mouth. “If you release that video, she’s suddenly nothing more than a mother who has no idea what’s going on with in her own home, who’s been lying to public about who her son really is, who raised a sociopathic man-child that has sex in inappropriate places with inappropriate people. Why should we trust her with the country when she can’t even be trusted with her own family? They’ll forget about all the good she can do for the republic, all the hard work she’s put in to get here. It’ll undermine her entire presidency before she even has a chance to get her feet under her, and _that’s_ if they don’t impeach her, or if the Republicans don’t magically invent election fraud and get her recalled.”

He rubs his hands across his face, feeling the five-o-clock shadow on his jaw that’s erupted into full stubble. “So, I’m asking you not to do this. I’m asking you to consider the consequences for the president-elect and the county and _not do this_.”

Kali looks at him with fake concern in her eyes. “Jesus, you’re seriously brainwashed, aren’t you?”

“Last chance, Kali.”

“What, or I get the ‘fear’ option?” She snorts, tucking her camera into its bag.  Stiles waits for a second when Kali’s eyes aren’t focused on him and pounces, and it’s surprisingly easy to get one hand on the side of her head and use it to slam her other temple into the wall. She crumples, boneless, and Stiles crouches beside her to frantically check her pulse and breathing, sending up a prayer of thanks when both are steady. With his other hand, he digs through his discarded bag until he finds his cell phone and makes a call that he’d hoped he would never have to make.

“Isaac? It’s Stiles. I’m ready to take you up on the trade we discussed.”

 

It’s five in the morning when Stiles finally, finally gets back to his hotel room. He sets his back to the door and slides down, settling to the carpet in his wrinkled pants and stained shirt. He doesn’t have his suit jacket, doesn’t remember taking it off, doesn’t think he’ll ever get it back, doesn’t really care. His first major debrief with Greenberg starts in two hours. He feels raw, inside and out. He can’t seem to get his brain to string together a logical thought, and nothing feels real under his fingertips as he turns on the shower, shucks his ruined clothes, and stands under the spray. He stays in the shower until his legs stop shaking and his stomach stops heaving – about forty-five minutes, according to the clock in his room – dresses for the day, and sits at his desk to wait. He scrolls through unread text messages and listens to voicemails from the night before. Congratulatory messages from his dad, Scott, Lydia, and a bunch of other law school friends. A job offer from a news station, a different job offer from a newspaper. Eighteen texts from Derek, all variations on _I’m sorry_ and _Talk to me_ and _What happened?_ and one from Laura that says _I don’t know what he did, but he’s passed out drunk on my floor and said you’ll never forgive him. Do I need to kill him?_

He deletes everything except the messages from his dad and his friends. He composes appropriate responses to those and sends them out. When it’s finally 6:55, he heads downstairs to meet Maddie for a pre-Greenberg breakfast, and his phone beeps once as he steps out of the elevator.

Isaac. _It’s done_.

 

Stiles doesn’t consider himself a prideful person, but there are a couple things he’s proud of. He is a good friend and a good son. He is calm in the face of crisis. He can take an internal combustion engine apart and put it back together. He can write a fifteen-page research paper with footnotes in eight hours.

What he’s perhaps most proud of, though, is that he makes it through the next three days, back to Palo Alto, into the little apartment he shares with Scott, and gets the door of his dusty, packed-away bedroom shut before giving in to the panic attack.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MY LOVES. As always, your comments and kudos and general support overwhelm me. A few of you told me that you've been pointed here by some of my favorite other AO3 writers and I'm basically dying and fangirling and freaking out and giggling like an idiot while I read your comments. Seriously. 
> 
> Election Day - FINALLY! Did it answer all of your questions? No? Hmmmm, almost as if I planned it that way...
> 
> One chapter left! Coming Friday to a computer/tablet/phone screen near you. 
> 
> Chapter title is a lyric from Lua by Bright Eyes.


	10. i wish we'd never met, then met today

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick heads-up that this chapter jumps timelines TWICE, so read the headers to stay oriented!

**October, Year Four of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“Only if you’re sure,” Stiles says, adjusting Derek’s tie for the sixth time because he keeps tugging on it.

"Stiles, relax,” Derek says, shoving his hands away. “Honestly, I would have thought that of all the people rooting for me to publicly confirm my sexuality, you’d be pretty high on the list.”

“I completely support this as your campaign manager,” Stiles says. One of the volunteers babbles in his earpiece about curtain times. “And as your friend, I’m proud of you and think you’re making the right decision. Just be _sure_. There’s no taking it back. And be sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

“I’m doing this because I _am_ gay, and I’m tired of hiding it,” Derek says, standing up. “You told me once that you swore never to let someone make you feel ashamed of who you are. It’s about time I did the same.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, unable to stop the grin from spreading over his face. “Okay. Curtain goes up in three minutes. You have your cue cards?”

“I have my cue cards.”

“You’ll be polite to Elliott Green?”

“I will be polite to Elliott Green, unless he talks about extending public school periods an hour on both ends.”

“Once again: You’ll be polite to Elliott Green.”

“I will _attempt_ to be polite to Elliott Green.”

“Good enough. Go make your mama proud,” Stiles says, sending Derek onstage for the first of several town hall-style debates in the Louisiana governor’s race. He watches Derek cross the stage to his podium and make adjustments to the microphone’s height, looking for all the world like he’s been doing this his entire life.

Which, Stiles supposes, he has.

“Is he ready?” Cora asks, arriving breathless besides Stiles. “I didn’t miss it?”

“You didn’t miss it, and he’s ready,” Stiles confirms, marking off a few more things on his clipboard as the staffers and volunteers call out the last-minute checks. “I still can’t believe he’s doing this.”

“I can’t believe it was _his_ idea to leak the pictures from last April to the press,” Cora says.

“He wants to control the narrative,” Stiles says, smiling. “It’s a big step.”

 

They’re nearly at the end of the hour-long debate when it happens – someone from the public references the recently uncovered pictures of Derek being intimate with another man at a bar.

“I’m glad you brought this up, Harris,” Derek says, smiling broadly, “because it gives me the opportunity to put these rumors to bed once and for all. We are, however, short of time, so I’ll keep this brief and let us get back to the issues that are more pressing than my private life. Yes, I am gay. I’ve kept my personal life private for many reasons, but with these pictures out there in the world now, I think it’s important for me to stand here before all of you and make it clear that I am not ashamed or embarrassed. I am gay, and that may change some of your perspectives of me, but that’s just one piece of who I am.  It doesn't change my policies, it doesn't change the sort of leader I'll be. So, Louisiana, if you still want to make me your governor…” Derek trails off, letting too much time pass in the pause, and when Stiles looks up sharply to give his what-the-hell-are-you-doing, keep-talking face, Derek is smiling down at the podium. “Actually,” Derek says slowly. “You know what – no. Don’t elect me governor.”

Stiles’ heart stops.

“What the hell is he doing?” Cora hisses. “That’s not the speech. That is _definitely_ not the speech.”

The moderator coughs into her microphone. “Uh, Mr. Hale. What do you mean by that?”

“I mean,” Derek says, closing his portfolio, “I don’t want to be governor. I’ve never wanted to be governor. Louisiana, I love you. I’ve got the bayou in my veins and the Quarter in my heart, but I honestly have no interest in governing you.”

Stiles throws his clipboard at the wall. 

“You know who does want to govern you, though?” Derek says, plucking his mic off its stand and walking over toward Elliott, and dear _God_ it’s like someone else is controlling his body as well as his vocal chords. “This guy. Elliott Green. We get along and have a lot of the same ideas anyway, so you should probably just vote for him. Well, don’t let him make the changes he wants to make to public school hours, because it’s just an idiotic idea and there are studies that prove teenagers need at least eight hours of sleep. And I swear, Elliott, if you actually try to start construction on the bridge in January I will personally drive the Mardi Gras floats the to governor’s mansion and park them in your driveway. But other than that? He’s pretty great. So my vote is that we elect him as governor, I’m going to stick to running HaleEnt. Thank you, and goodnight.” He turns off his mic, drops it on Elliott’s podium, and heads offstage, making a beeline straight for Stiles.

Stiles is dimly aware that the debate’s audience has completely devolved into chaos. The poor moderator looks like she’s a few seconds away from a cardiac incident, and Elliott Green is staring after Derek like he’s waiting for someone to let him in on the joke. He’s dimly aware of these things, but his primary focus is on Derek, who closes the last bit of distance between them, grabs him by the upper arm, and starts tugging him half-stumbling back through the wings toward the little dressing room-type area they’d been waiting in before.

“You know,” Stiles says, tripping over a wire, “that was probably the _least_ professional way you could have done that. Like, _ever_.”

“Good thing I’m not looking go into a career in politics, then.”

“Apparently not.”

Derek yanks him into the dressing room, knocks the “Hale for Governor” baseball cap off Stiles’ head, and kisses him.

Stiles can’t think for a solid three seconds. A solid three seconds, then his brain kickstarts and he places both hands on Derek’s shoulders and _shoves_.

Derek staggers a step and a half back, but that’s all the room Stiles needs. “I am not a toy to play with when it is _convenient_ for you.”

Derek laughs, if a little weakly. “Stiles, that’s not what this is. It’s not like that.”

“It’s not? This isn’t all a game to you? Because I just watched you quit a race that a lot of people on your team have put a _lot_ of time and effort into and you were so _flippant_ and _careless_ about it – was that supposed to be _endearing_? This isn’t a romantic comedy where you make some grand gesture in front of a crowd and then you get the guy in a swell of orchestra music, Derek, this is real life and there’s a governor’s seat on the line and – what is _wrong_ with you?”

Derek gapes at him.

“What did you _think_ was going to happen, Derek?” Stiles continues, dialing back a little. “Did you think you’d just sweep me off my feet? We’d ride off into the sunset? I’m happy for you, _honestly_. If you don’t want to be governor, then you made the right choice – I wish you’d have talked to me, because I’m your freaking campaign manager –.”

“I didn’t know I was going to do it until I did it,” Derek interrupts, pleading. “I just – I all of a sudden realized –.”

“And decided to make a public scene instead of finishing the debate and quietly withdrawing later? You made a beautiful statement about being gay and proud, about how sexual orientation isn't the be-all, end-all of a man's character, and then _stomped_ on it. It’s going to be on the internet in five minutes and someone’s going to gif you saying ‘You know what? No. Don’t elect me,’ and play it as a reaction every time your mother says something controversial for the next four weeks.”

Stiles watches Derek’s face fall.

“Oh, just remembering that your mother is running for re-election right now?” Stiles says. “Doesn’t it just _suck_ when your actions have consequences? God, Derek, I really thought you’d changed. I thought you’d grown up, that you were different, but you are still _exactly_ the same. You don’t _think_. You don’t _consider_ how what you do is going to affect the people around you. And I…I’m done.”

Stiles pushes around Derek and heads for the exit, blood rushing in his ears.

"I think I’m in love with you,” Derek calls, and yeah, that stops Stiles in his tracks with his hand outstretched for the door. Because Stiles wanted to hear those words from Derek so, _so_ badly in the past. Because Stiles had loved him in a completely overwhelming way, a permanently altering way, and even now there’s a piece of Stiles’ heart that belongs to Derek.

“I _know_ I’m in love with you,” Derek says, his voice close to Stiles’ ear, because he’s moved up behind him without Stiles noticing. Derek’s hands gently come down on Stiles’ shoulders, and Stiles feels the contact at every point along his body. It would be easy for Stiles to turn to Derek, to meet halfway, to give his 23-year-old self the relationship he never got. And it would feel right and comfortable and fine, and Stiles would probably be very, very happy.

But Stiles isn’t 23 anymore. And he doesn’t want the things he wanted when he was 23. Now he wants to go back to Scott and Lydia, to Isaac and Malia and Kira. He wants to figure out how deep B6-13’s influence runs, and how they thought assassinating the President of the United States was good for the republic. He doesn’t want _right_ and _comfortable_ and _fine._ He wants _excellent_ and _accomplished_ and _I_ earned _this with blood, sweat, and tears._

“I’m in love with you,” Derek says, and it’s a benediction and a curse.

“That’s not enough,” Stiles says, and he walks out the door.

 

 **June, Talia Hale’s Campaign (4.42 years ago)**

Derek’s flight from BOS to SFO gets in around 11pm on Sunday, but he’s still not completely over his jetlag from Cairo so he’s wide awake on the taxi ride to Hale campaign headquarters. He picks his way through the requisite maze of desks, signage, and conference rooms, following mumbled directions from sleepy volunteers and waving off the occasional “Good to have you back!” or “Congratulations!” from campaign team members who know that he’s coming in from formally accepting a spot at Harvard’s Business School, to start in January. He finally finds the makeshift auditorium in the back of HQ, where a dozen staff are standing around watching his mom mock debate – looks like Peter’s filling in as the opposition for the night. Derek meanders toward the front of the room and slides in next to Laura.

As always, Derek feels a silly little sense of pride watching his mother on stage. Talia Hale is confident, charismatic, poised, never thrown by a question – even though the moderator seems to be purposefully trying to do just that.

“Your foreign aid policies are significantly more generous than Governor Talbot’s, Senator Hale,” the moderator, a skinny-looking, mole-studded kid who probably can’t legally order at a bar yet, is saying. “Latest polls show that 72% of Americans would rather put our dollars back to work domestically. What would you say to the hardworking American citizens whose tax dollars you plan on giving away to other countries?”

“Not exactly pitching softballs, is he?” Derek whispers to Laura, smiling a little as his mom launches into a prepared answer that she somehow delivers genuinely. “Who is that?”

“New kid wonder,” Laura grunts, her eyes flicking between their mother and her clipboard, where she’s furiously jotting notes. “Came on as an interim speech writer a couple months ago when Jerry got sick, but he’s blown people out of the water since then. Writes better than the tenured staff, quick brain for analysis, speaks like a press secretary when he’s not dicking around. He’s been handling debate prep for the past few weeks. Mom’s taken a shine to him and he impressed the hell out of Dad.”

Derek watches the debate for a while, forcing himself to assess the moderator on more than his physical appearance. It’s immediately apparent that Laura’s right – the guy’s incredibly bright and well spoken. He handles Peter’s slick remarks with biting wit and skillful redirection. He gives as good as he gets when Talia references both historic and current events. He offers earnest, insightful feedback in a way that’s charmingly blunt.

“Okay, yeah, he’s good,” Derek admits to Laura when the mock debate breaks up just before midnight. Eight people immediately flock to his mother, asking questions and giving updates. “What’s his background, though? Since when do we let teenagers hold campaign team positions?”

“He’s 23,” Laura says, making a final note and dotting an _i_ rather more viciously than absolutely necessary. “And he’s deferring his last semester at Stanford Law to help the campaign. Don’t be a jerk.” She tucks the clipboard into her bag, then slings the whole thing over her shoulder and surprises Derek with a hug. “Congrats on b-school – we’ll get drinks this weekend to celebrate? Hotel’s two blocks north of here, your room should be ready, breakfast in the lobby at 7. Good to have you back, baby bro.”

She’s out the door before Derek finishes processing all the information. He stifles a yawn and shoulders his own bag, figuring he’ll follow the exodus to the hotel and catch up with the rest of his family in the morning, when he spots the moderator still sitting alone at his little table, flipping through pages of scribbled notes.

“Hey,” Derek calls, forcing himself to stroll casually over, becoming increasingly aware that this kid – this 23-year-old semi-genius gift-to-campaigning – is unfairly attractive. And not as skinny as he appears from a distance. Up close, the collared shirt, rolled-up sleeves, and skinny tie belie broad shoulders, muscled arms, and a strong chest, and – _whoa, hey, keep it together, Hale_. “I’m Derek.”

“The prodigal son!” The guy grins, standing up to shake Derek’s hand, and yes, that’s exactly what Derek needs – a full-body shot of lean muscles tapering into belted slacks that absolutely have to be tailored, because no one looks that good in normal dress pants. “So glad you’re here, so good to have you back, thanks for your service to our country and all that! The senator and Laura have been singing your praises nonstop since I joined up in Houston. You’re coming from Egypt by way of Boston, right? Man, you’ve got to be wiped. I’ll walk you up to the hotel, just give me a second.” The guy sweeps all of his stuff haphazardly into a bag, talking the entire time. “I swear I need, like, a llama to carry all this shit around with me. A pack-llama. Is that a thing? Anyway, if it’s cool with you, there are some talking points in the debate in Sacramento three weeks from now – that’s the one focusing on economics – that I’d like you to look over. The finer details of macroeconomics aren’t really my strong suit, and Laura said you wrote a thesis on some macro concept that I can’t remember right now and would be able to help.”

“Yeah,” Derek says, a little dazed by the fast talk. “I can do that.”

The guy flashes him a brilliant smile, then looks suddenly stricken. “Crap, I’m totally rude! Rambling on and on even though we met literally thirty seconds ago. I’d blame it on the long day, but that’d be a lie because I’m kind of just like this all the time when I’m not in business mode --.”

He seems to forcibly cut himself off, then stops walking and turns to Derek with another smile. He offers his hand again, and Derek shakes it again. “It’s nice to meet you, Derek,” he says. “I’m Stiles.”

Derek is screwed.

 

**October, Fourth Year of Talia Hale’s First Term**

“And he _really_ thought you’d just…go back to him?” Malia asks, offering Stiles the scissors.

He snags them and slices open three more boxes. If he’d known he was only going to be onsite for Derek’s campaign for three weeks, he wouldn’t have packed up all of his stuff to keep it from getting dusty before leaving. But he didn’t know, so he did pack, and now Malia’s helping him put his apartment back together before the rest of the little S&A family arrives for dinner and to finally watch the Senate vote on the gun control bill.

“Honestly, I don’t think he really _thought_ about it much at all,” Stiles says. He hauls out a stack of plates and takes them to the sink for a pre-dinner wash. “Planning was never really his strong suit.”

“Well, good for you,” Malia says, coming to stand next to Stiles and taking up a dishtowel. “I think it’s great that you got out of that.”

“Oh?” Stiles passes her a dripping plate, watching the way the little pieces of hair that escaped her ponytail swing as she circles the plate’s edge with a towel.

“Yeah,” Malia says, sounding surprised and looking up at him through dark eyelashes. “He hurt you, right? And you couldn’t trust him? He would’ve held you back.”

“Right,” Stiles says, looking back at her for a moment. “Hey, can you, uh, make sure the TV’s set up correctly? I tried to plug all the wires back in, but there were some extras that I don’t remember existing before I left.”

“Sure,” Malia says, carefully setting down the plate and spreading out the towel. “Just stack the plates and I’ll dry them in a minute.”

“Thanks,” Stiles says faintly, rolling out his shoulders. Malia's been steadily bringing in intel on B6-13 ever since she showed up in his office back in January, helping Stiles and the rest of the S&A team start to put together the very, very rough edges of what's turning out to be a several thousand piece puzzle that they lost the lid to. She's keeping them one step ahead of the B6-13 team that's hunting Kate, and she's somehow gotten Isaac off their radar. Before he headed to New Orleans for Derek's campaign, he and Malia had been having those little moments of piercing connection more and more frequently; he’d almost forgotten what it felt like. She is dangerous, out of his comfort zone, and has a darkness in her past that they've has only just begun to wade into. She’s blunt and has a tendency to disappear for a few days at a time for B6-13 work with no explanation and is the only person Stiles knows who can speak to Isaac on his level, and all of these things scare Stiles a little bit – but make him want to keep her around all the more. She's a riddle, and Stiles doesn't like not knowing the answer.

“Oh,” she says, spinning on her heel and reaching into her back pocket and holding something up. “Almost forgot. I finally got a picture of Command.”

“Great, just leave it on the kitchen table,” Stiles says, jerking his head toward his sudsy arms.

“Will do. Where’s your wireless router?”

“That is an _excellent_ question.”

Malia rolls her eyes, and Stiles has one of those Stiles-Stilinski-this-is-your-life moments: secret government assassin rolling her eyes in his kitchen. “I’ll find it.”

“Anyone home?” Scott calls as he lets himself in, followed by Lydia and Kira and Isaac carrying food.

“Scottie!” Stiles calls back, and the night blurs into hugs and Stiles getting updates on all the current S&A cases and extra hands to help unpack and cheering when the Senate passes the bill.

It’s only at the very end of the night, when Stiles hears Lydia sigh, “God, Stiles, your mom was _so_ pretty,” that Stiles’ heart drops into his stomach.

He looks over from the fridge, where he’s playing leftovers Tetris, to where Lydia is standing by the kitchen table. He knows perfectly well that there is exactly one picture of his mother in his apartment, and it’s his parents' wedding picture in his bedroom.

“What do you mean?” He asks. He closes the fridge and skirts the counter, leaning over Lydia’s shoulder to see the picture she’s holding in her hand, and it hits him in the gut like a sledgehammer, because he’s never seen this picture before.

“It was under my purse on the table,” Lydia says. “She was lovely, wasn’t she? I’m so sorry that I didn’t get to meet her.”

“Malia,” Stiles calls, trying very, very hard to keep his breathing under control.

“Yeah?” Her head pops up from over the back of the couch.

“Where’d you put that picture of Command?”

“On the table,” she says, hopping lightly over the couch and crossing to them. “Right there – yeah, the one Lydia’s holding.”

“This,” Stiles says, ripping the picture of Lydia’s hand and holding it in front of Malia’s face. “This woman is Command? You see her at work.”

“Yeah, I saw her earlier today,” Malia says, looking back and forth between Lydia and Scott’s horror-struck faces and Stiles, and Stiles can’t even begin to guess what expression is on his face right now. “She gave me my next assignment. What’s going on? Who is she?”

“She’s my mother,” Stiles says, sitting down hard at the table, the picture crinkling around the edges in his hand. “My mother is alive. My mother is the head of B6-13.”

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BOOM. 
> 
> Okay, so, first of all, THANK YOU. Seriously. Everyone who's read and given kudos and written comments and feedback and indulged this weird little AU that started as a drabble and exploded into something way more involved - you're all amazing, I love you all to pieces, and I probably wouldn't have gotten this done on nearly this timeline or to this caliber without your incredible support, so THANK YOU. 
> 
> Second: I sincerely hope no one hates me. I NEVER PROMISED ENDGAME STEREK. Buuuut I'm also not saying that they won't, ultimately, end up together at the end of the series. I'm also not saying that they _will_ end up together at the end of the series. Bwahaha? 
> 
> Third: I am already working on the second arc in this series so NO YELLING AT ME! I will _hopefully_ start posting The Fixer in Wonderland on Monday, November 17, although I reserve the right to push that back if needed. I'll keep the predicated posting schedule up-to-date on my profile! In the meantime, comments and prompts and emails with your love definitely drive me to work faster :) 
> 
> Fourth: Chapter title is a lyric from Backwards Walk by Frightened Rabbit.
> 
> Fifth: I'm thebestadventureever on tumblr. Come say hi! 
> 
> Sixth: Seriously. You're all amazing. I love you and GOODNIGHT.


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